Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Cloud Hosting : looking for cloudcomputing management software

[SoftDux]

Hi all,

Does anyone know of any working and well maintained cloud computing software?

I'm looking for something that could:

1. allow end users to setup their own XEN VPS's
2. migrate VPS's to any node int the pool as needed - for example when load is too high on ServerA, migrate VPS8 to ServerB
3. offer high availability both for the VPS's, and the management node
4. make use of NAS devices for central storage
5. offer online resource (RAM / CPU / HDD space) upgrades & downgrades
6. the ability to scale to x+n, i.e give clients more resources by adding more server nodes to the pool
7. run on Linux

I had a look out VMware, but I can't justify the costs on the small amount of VPS's that I currently have. And Applogic doesn't return my emails, so I have no idea what it even costs.


Any suggestions?

[prashant1979]

Check OpenQRM. It might have just what you need.

[SoftDux]

I have checked out OpenQRM, but it's way too complicated I don't really want to hack together a system and maintain it all day long.

[XSV]

Here's another option I've seen mentioned before, I have no association or first hand experience with it.

http://www.virtualmin.com/cloudmin-offer

[SoftDux]

CloudMin isn't quite a Cloudcomputing platform, yet. I am trying it out now, but it doesn't offer much at this stage.

[praveenkv1988]

You can use Virtuozzo.

[prashant1979]

Originally Posted by praveenkv1988

You can use Virtuozzo.

Virtuozzo does not support multiple physical servers.

[SoftDux]

Virtuzzo / OpenVZ also doesn't support real virtualization. It's software based emulated virtualization

[thinkovi]

You might want to check also UBUNTU Cloud computing http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud

[SoftDux]

Ubuntu cloud won't really operate nicely in web hosting environment. I'm looking for something that has a web interface, like that vps.net or http://www.gogrid.com/ has, but something that won't break the bank.

[SoftDux]

.... and I'm not really a fan of Ubuntu I prefer enterprise class OS's like CentOS / Debian / FreeBSD / etc

[SoftDux]

So I take it that what I'm looking for doesn't exist, yet?

[eming]

Originally Posted by SoftDux

So I take it that what I'm looking for doesn't exist, yet?

well, guys like 3tera, vmops, flexiant and others do stuff like this...

[fastdeploy]

Originally Posted by SoftDux

So I take it that what I'm looking for doesn't exist, yet?

What you want really doesn't exist. There's RightScale, Enomaly, and some other vendors (HyperVM (now basically "EOL"), SolarVPS, VPS.Net, etc. come to mind) but nothing that does all that you're asking for and most are geared to enterprises, "cloud services," linking into existing cloud services (Amazon EC2, GoGrid, etc.) and so on.

As far as clustering/failover goes, you might look at Proxmox VE. It doesn't allow users to create VMs but you can certainly do it yourself through its web UI and it supports OpenVZ, Xen, and KVM. It doesn't have an API itself but you may be able to access the libvirt API through your own scripts and/or other third-party tools.

I've setup Eucalyptus before - the cloud platform that "Ubuntu Cloud" is based on (Eucalyptus has packages for CentOS as well I believe, you don't HAVE to use Ubuntu) - and it works almost exactly like Amazon EC2. In fact, EC's AMI machine creation / teardown / configuration tools work with Eucalyptus so it's basically note-for-note API compatible with EC2. It has its own S3-like storage system Walrus and can have persistent storage if you want the VM to survive beyond the first reboot. Like EC2, Eucalyptus VMs are designed to be provisioned on-the-fly and are destroyed automatically when they're shutdown or rebooted - but again there are ways to make them persistent.

Transforming the existing VPS/VM marketplace into a "cloud" marketplace is still in its infancy from a provisioning, management, and billing perspective. Big vendors like VMware and Citrix and Microsoft are introducing tools all the time, but many are big bucks and they are focusing on the enterprise market place.

In short - there is a lot of opportunity out there for doing this.

[SoftDux]

Thank you, serverminds

What you have provided was what I was looking for, and confirmed my suspicion. There isn't anything affordable for this kind of operation. I don't consider Amazon EC2 as cloud computing, since you need to shutdown the instance to add more space & RAM - which is just another VPS.

HyperVM / SolusVM / FluidVM / etc are all just VPS management systems as well

And while VMware & 3tera can do this, it is exuberantly expensive, beyond the point where it makes financial sense in a shared / reseller / VPS hosting market. I was looking for somewhere where we could scale our Linux hosting, for shared & reseller clients beyond the physical constraints that traditional hardware offers and the concept of cloud computing could have been the right way to go, but it doesn't yet exist.