Ask slashdot: Which 100+ User Virtualization Solution Should I Use?

Gonzalez_S writes "Let's say you need to give access to 100+ users to create their own virtual machines and devices (eg. switches, .., ms windows or linux family) in a manageable and secure way. Which virtualization solution would you choose? There are vmware, xen, kvm, .. based solutions, but which one would you prefer and why? The solution should be stable, manageable, scriptable and preferably have ldap integration. In this case I also need to setup a playground for IT students, next to hosting production servers on the same system."

VMWare, Ubuntu and Puppet

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

When my company had to come up with a solution to have all of our developers to develop in an environment that absolutely mimicked the production server we used a combination of VMWare to run a version of the Ubuntu. Puppet made creating all of this really easy. It gave us the ability to completely blow away a machine and reconstitute in very little time.

You cannot mix production and playground

[gweihir]

Virtualization will not isolate them against each other. For example, it is quite easy to saturate I/O from the playground. Then your production performance goes down the drain as well. Also, basically no plain virtualization is really secure, these things are fat too complex. Another reason not to mix different classification levels like production and playground. Maybe if you really, really carefully isolate them with SE-Linux, but then you still have things like VM-to-VM crypto-key leakage.

Re:Hyper-V or vSphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

As such, Hyper-V and SystemCenter would provide you with a fairly good experience that is easy to manage and automatically deploy based off of Active Directory. It is a solution that will likely meet all of your stated requirements and your other likely needs and wants in a package that is "good enough".

As long as your definition of "good enough" includes endless problems with Linux guests.

linux and virtual box

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran redhat 6.0 with virtualbox to 60 plus student doing computer science projects. The base was on a quad core with 16 Gb and local Tb storage. this worked great with ssh access. Adim was via nomachine and ssh.

Try the same in redhat 6.3 with redhat virtualization.

Re:Hyper-V or vSphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that you are likely out of an educational institution, Microsoft likely provides you with free licenses for their products. As such, Hyper-V and SystemCenter would provide you with a fairly good experience that is easy to manage and automatically deploy based off of Active Directory. It is a solution that will likely meet all of your stated requirements and your other likely needs and wants in a package that is "good enough".

They are not free. They come with the price of an especially tight vendor lock-in (not just the virtualization product, but also the host system).

oVirt

[new23d]

oVirt, of course. It is the upstream of RHEV - which is Red Hat's offering, well polished and what not.

Re:If you have to ask /.

[hodet]

What a load of elitist bullshit. Maybe he has already done a lot of research and has a good idea. Do you really think he is panicking and turning to /. because he has no clue? I think that this, being a technical community that still has alot of expertise and insight in it, he decided to hear other peoples/professionals perspectives.