Ask slashdot: Which 100+ User Virtualization Solution Should I Use? 191
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."
That already exists... (Score:3, Informative)
Why not work with AWS to setup a "private cloud" sandbox? Reserved instances can keep your costs relatively flat, and the AWS crew seems pretty amenable to helping out when it comes to unique needs...
Re:That already exists... (Score:4, Informative)
You have a very good point in that Amazon is about 80% of the virtualization market and growing and are far more competent than anyone except Google. There's almost no other API it is worth dealing directly except for ones which access both EC2, Eucalyptus and OpenStack. Amazon's infrastructure is also pretty cheap as long as you are not too demanding. Certainly much cheaper than their competitors.
There are some serious problems though. Amazon will ban you if you start to run serious security, stability or load tests on their systems. This means that whilst it may be suitable for production use (if you overload in production they will normally work with you to solve "real" problems) it is not suitable for testing or learning. Amazon's infrastructure is also pretty opaque and when you start researching into detail they may get upset. Finally, Amazon has some "interesting" performance limits which they will never care about fixing.
This means that the correct answer to the question posed is to use Eucalyptus [wikipedia.org], which provides an Amazon compatible interface as your private cloud and to use Amazon for whatever suits the public cloud. Your research students and some of your production use which has a benefit from being private (typically needs access to large amounts of data currently locked inside your network for whatever reason) can be on the Eucalyptus.
Eucalyptus had some stability problems which are going away. It was also delicate to configure and the configuration files are still nasty. However it's definitely the only currently functional solution to the problem set above.
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Amazon will ban you if you start to run serious ... load tests
That's unlikely.
How do you think they could they even hypothetically distinguish between your hypothetical "load test" and heavy computing that is a very typical use of their rent-by-the-hour computing resources.
VMWare vs Citrix (Score:5, Informative)
vmware is cheaper and easier to set up
Citrix is a lot more expensive and a PITA to set up but a lot faster since Windows 7 and later has native citrix code in it for virtualization and a lot more customization
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Just make sure you disable Excel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk_va2LLox4 [youtube.com]
(Added bonus, those guys are friggin hilarious, check out their other talks).
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Not to sound like an ass but I need something tested and well supported. Not freeware.
+100 users have specific needs as well as the I.T. staff who need to manage it on 100 users. A hypervisor is not what is needed. What is needed is a real managed, supported, and configurable way, and scaleable. That means clustering, no special software if possible for each client, authentication to the VM, scalability on the servers, IE or Firefox addons or none at all with a java server frontend to the VMs etc.
Xen is jus
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A lot depends on what you want to host. The Windows Type 1 hypervisor platforms are well-known. If you want to host Linux/BSD/etc., there's really a different family for that.
If you want to add-in VDI, it's a different mix of products, but the commercial vendors are the same. VMware is expensive, Citrix less-so, Oracle is reasonable if and only if you like Oracle; Microsoft supports Microsoft and a hand-picked set of Linux options.
But you can teach a lot by using Xen, vyatta, and a bunch of FOSS components
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VMWare, Ubuntu and Puppet (Score:5, Interesting)
KVM, Gentoo, and Salt Stack (Score:3)
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.
We did the exact same thing for developing proprietary trading software, using KVM on Gentoo with Salt Stack. There are numerous free options for achievin
Dumb question - sharing OS disks between VMs (Score:3)
This is a dumb question, but is there a recommended way to share operating system virtual disks between VMs, so you don't need 100 copies of the same Ubuntu? I realize you could set up one server VM and advertise /usr/share over nfs or samba across a virtual switch, but are there better approaches?
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do you need full virtualization? (Score:3)
If you can get away with sharing one kernel (and ideally one distro for userspace), a container-based solution is likely going to be less resource-intensive overall.
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If you can get away with sharing one kernel (and ideally one distro for userspace), a container-based solution is likely going to be less resource-intensive overall.
well, he needs virtual switches and routers so they can ditch the physical networks learning lab.
Hyper-V or vSphere. (Score:5, Informative)
If you have a budget, consider VMware's vSphere offering. It can get pretty expensive (license costs greater than that of your physical hardware) however it is currently best-in-class and provides some truly amazing administration tools.
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Free = ESXi = HyperV
Managed = not free = vSphere = Virtual Machine Manager
Microsoft's Virtual Machine Manager is not free and has other component requirements that will significantly add to your implementation costs unless you are already running Systems Center and SQL.
The last time we tried HV & VMM was Windows 2008 R2 w/ VMM 2010. MS brought in a partner to set it up as a direct comparison to our production vSphere plant. It was a joke.
I think we had to stand up 2 or 3 extra servers (VMs) to manag
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There is basically no lock-in to any virtualisation platform these days. They all use essentially open virtual hard disk formats and it's trivial to convert from one to the other. But you end up locked in anyway, as all your scripting & management is targeted at whatever platform you choose - be it KVM/vSphere/Hyper-V. So choose the one that makes managing it easiest for you. If you like bash, choose KVM. If you like PowerShell, choose Hyper-V or vSphere.
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Moving Windows machines around different Hypervisors is generally non-trivial.
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Honestly, I've not found that to be the case. In most cases, you can disable the integration drivers in the guest, then move the VM to the new virtualization platform and start it back up. You may need to do a startup repair or in-place upgrade on an older version of Windows; Windows 7 (2008 R2) and 8 (2012), however, are fairly resilient.
The smoothest way to do it, though, if you've got the time, is to use the new platform's P2V tool to create a new virtualized VM based on the old one. This is how I've mov
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As long as your definition of "good enough" includes endless problems with Linux guests.
A couple of years ago, you would have been right. Anything with a 3.0 or above kernel has all of the Hyper-V modules in the kernel. For CentOS or RHEL, you can use the integration tools. I run about a dozen Linux machines on our Hyper-V cluster without any issues.
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I second this. I've migrated several business services (e.g. svn, flyspray, etc.) from physical boxes running various OSes (W2K8, Ubuntu) to CentOS virtual hosts on HyperV. Apart from one issue*, which is a stupidity using Minimal CentOS unrelated to Hyper-V, I have yet to see a single problem running CentOS on Hyper-V.
* CentOS Minimal requires manual network setup, which is fine, but there is no plug-and-play support. So whenever the VM is moved to a new Hyper-V server, the CentOS networking breaks (the so
Yep (Score:5, Informative)
Our central infrastructure is on Hyper-V at work now on account of VMWare wanting way too much money. We use a lot of RHEL systems and they all work well. Our web server, MySQL server, puppet server, that sort of thing all run on Hyper-V. The Linux admin didn't have much trouble with it. The main limitation I'm aware of is that you can't do dynamic memory.
While it isn't ad Linux friendly as VMWare, it seems to work just fine. As to which between them you should use, depends on features and price. In our case Hyper-V was "free" since we have software assurance with MS campus wide and VMWare wanted like $20,000 per system for vSphere with the feature set we wanted, so it was stacked heavily to Hyper-V. You case may be different, so make sure to check out both.
However don't write off Hyper-V because it is MS. With Server 2012 it is a real, no-shit, enterprise virtualization solution that works well and has loads of good features. They fixed their rubbish networking from 2008R2 also, their virtual switches are exceedingly fast, and it supports full SR-IOV if your NICs do.
I was very pleased when I tried it out, our Linux admin liked it, so we migrated (we had an old VMWare 3 setup). Migrating VMs was easy too. Uninstall VMWare tools, use the Starwind converter to go from vmdk to vhd, use Hyper-V to go from vhd to vhdx (and make it fixed size), set up a VM, start it, and install the integration services.
Openstack (Score:1)
I'd consider openstack for this.
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Cloud management... is is gigantic pile of virtualization of:
1. Networking; (NaaS)
2. Hardware; (IaaS)
3. Computing environments, and; (PaaS)
4. Applications. (SaaS)
So uhm... Openstack should run fine on RHEL and Fedora, utilizing Linux kernel features, making use of a hypervisor...
Proxmox (Score:5, Informative)
It's free and offers higher performance than VMWare (which as far as ESXi 5 goes) sucks.
You can create users with privilege levels as expected and you may also cluster several servers together (as you can with other solutions).
You can also do containers OR a full virtual machine depending upon the OS you are trying to emulate.
Give this a shot before paying for any of the software others have recommended. Our company has switched all virtualized servers to run on Proxmox hosts and the uptime is 100% with MANY users.
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I came here to say this. Proxmox is very cool. I haven't had the opportunity to use it in a production environment, but the testing I did with it left me impressed with its simplicity and capability. It has node management built in and is laid out very logically. Definitely worth a look!
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I agree with the Proxmox sentiment. It has served us very well and continues to do so.
KVM (Score:5, Informative)
End of story, everything else here is overkill. KVM sounds just about right for your needs and is very stable and FREE.
You can provide people with a variety of images and single command to deploy them (without root). It's not even that hard to setup. The hard part really is setting up an LDAP server to meet your needs.
Re:KVM (Score:5, Informative)
KVM is great for a environment where everyone is being cooperative; and sorta knows what they are doing. It lacks the resource management and isolation features you'd want in an academic lab. You need to be able control how much storage I/O a single vm can use. You might have someone learning about networking even doing things purposefully that are going to slam CPU resources like creating loops in Ethernet topologies.
Yes you might be able to get some Linux hosts with KVM to what you need with cgroups, and limits, etc but its going to be anything but simple and manageable across multiple physical hosts without tons of scripting and testing on your part. Libvirt is still a moving target, so keeping everything working is going to be adventure as well. All the precursors to provide the experience vSphere and Xen offer are there but lets not kidd anyone about the work that is still needed to get there. It would be wonderful if original poster could offer the resources to do that and even better if it could get contributed back to the community but its a tall order.
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kvm itself doesn't really give you anything in terms of control or management features. That all comes from libvirt or ganeti or whatever you've got. We've been using ganeti for a while and it does a reasonable job for our purposes but it is still a long way off from being something i'd feel comfortable deploying for customer use.
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If you want KVM with the manageability of VMWare, then oVirt is what you're looking for. Fee as well, open source and RedHat is investing heavily in it as they base their RedHat Enterprise Virtualization Manager product on it.
http://www.ovirt.org/ [ovirt.org]
If you ask me (Score:2, Informative)
Xen with paravirtualized guests would be stable and scale well, as I understand it. There is Xen Center to do this, or you could get the new Debian 7, which is supposed to have good support for that out of the box as well. It has good manageability as I understand it.
But yeah, I'd be of the inclination to do your research rather than have us make the choice for you. We can only offer suggestions, but you need a good idea of what you want to do too. For example, IT students often don't have a good understand
You cannot mix production and playground (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Virtualization will not isolate them against each other. For example, it is quite easy to saturate I/O from the playground.
That is an architecture issue. Implement Vsphere Enterprise+ with Network I/O control, Storage I/O control.
Put the playground on different SAN LUNs from the production LUNs.
Place the playground LUNs backed by different physical disks on separate vFilers, and/or use FlexShare [netapp.com] to prioritize production workloads.
Leverage vShield App / vCloud networking and security, to ensure I
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The timing and cache attacks are very much non-academic, unfortunately. As are the problems of generating good key-material in virtualized environments in the first place.
Your SAN proposal should solve the I/O issues, but it makes everything that more complicated as this has to be configured right, and that is _not_ easy and requires quite a bit of experience and skill. If it can be done at all without having the thing fail regularly for a while. It would be far easier to just have on production cluster and
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No, sorry, I do not need to re-read anything. VM key leakage is a practical problem at this time. It is just that in environments where it would be really interesting, they already know to use clouds segregated into classification levels. The problem of generating good keys in a VM is also very real and basically unsolved in practice.
That the script-kiddies do not understand it does not mean people with real skills cannot do it. But these people do not brag.
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vSphere has some great features, but that doesn't protect you from human error.
Just because you configure vSphere to properly throttle the playground doesn't mean someone can't easily come along and modify that resource in a horrible way.
Sounds like a job for..... (Score:4, Insightful)
A REAL Answer.. (Score:4, Informative)
There are a lot of options, and the OP is just asking for a general structure. Classic /. community fail to assume we are even dealing with someone that will be doing with implementation. This could be the director trying to get a ballpark before sinking their teeth in or a under-paid teacher, with little time, whto wants to make their students' learning environment better. I was the only one with a VPS in my classes, and thus the only one, in the end, who actually knew how to get anything done, outside of theory.
My rant to /. is over. Now to answer the OP:
The easiest way to get started would be Xen Cloud Platform + Citrix Xen Center. That alone will get you a free robust virtual hosting environment, but this will require you to set up a few VM templates and manually deploy to students. You can take this one step further by using OpenStack + XCP which will give you an API which you can use to build a web-front for student deployment. Some might already exist, but all the ones I am aware of are built around payment models.
As for users managing switches, I have no clue and good luck there. IMHO, I would VLAN and let OpenStack manage it. You can use the US Navy's network simulator [navy.mil] to teach concepts if you like. It even allows using tools like wireshark for real-world analysis experience.
Good luck, I hope you use this to make students more ready for the real world.
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As for users managing switches, I have no clue and good luck there. IMHO, I would VLAN and let OpenStack manage it.
VLAN used to be the common solution for networking with OpenStack. Though there are major drawbacks with that (limitation in the number of VLAN, hardware needs to support it, etc.), so these days, mostly everyone (me included) prefer the GRE tunnel solution.
linux and virtual box (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
OpenStack (Score:5, Informative)
The specific virtualization system you use doesn't really matter. You're looking for ways to manage it.
If you want to run your own cluster, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack [wikipedia.org] , specifically the Nova, Quantum, and Keystone components.
If you want to do it efficiently you might also want to consider using it as a service. Other people are already selling OpenStack on a massive scale with levels of efficiency that you'll never touch. Rent what you need, see what works, and then start building your own in-house when (or if) you find things you need to improve.
oVirt (Score:5, Informative)
www.ovirt.org
Full VM solution, for free. What more do you want. Easy to setup, easy to use, easy to control. It has LDAP integration.
oVirt (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenStack (Score:3)
What about Open Stack? For production, don't oversubscribe RAM. For a play ground, isolate them to one physical machine and let that machine over subscribe. I'm guessing but you can host about 20-25 virtual servers per compute node, you'll need a physical management machine, and if you do a lot of different images/want backups, you'll need a machine with a bunch of disk space or a iSCSI appliance. The open stack doc will tell you which iSCSI system will work.
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VMware - best in class but can be hideously expensive if you start using vsphere, but support is great
I get the idea you have some issue with VMware's pricing?
Of course their per-2 CPU up front software license costs for vSphere Enterprise Plus at $6,990, and probably closer to $8k per host after SnS are higher than the cost of paying $2500 for a basic XenEnterprise license, or nothing for Hyper-V.
The Hyper-V solution is more appropriate for running a very large number of cheap servers with local s
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However, at some places where they pay in-house admins, they might have carte-blanche to hack together whatever solution they like in whatever timeframe they like, to get something that's functional
In other words: "We'll make look X more expensive on paper by displacing costs for Y into other more discrete forms such as admin workload".
If your sysads are so idle, they can use company time without additional cost, maybe you need to cut their hours and hire an outsourced IT firm --- incremental co
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[...]or nothing for Hyper-V
Just a point that if you want feature equivalence with vSphere, Hyper-V is not free because you have to pay for all the management bits and pieces that go along with it.
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Hyper-V is not free because you have to pay for all the management bits and pieces that go along with it.
One of the supposed selling points of Hyper-V is you can perform live migrations directly between a pair of hosts without having to have a central management server, and you can write custom scripts to accomplish what vCenter would do for VMware.
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There's a lot more to vSphere than vMotion.
You can write custom scripts for ESXi to "accomplish what vCenter would do for VMware" as well, but by the time you did, you would have spent more on person time than you would have on just buying vSphere.
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You can write custom scripts for ESXi to "accomplish what vCenter would do for VMware" as well, but by the time you did, you would have spent more on person time than you would have on just buying vSphere.
Very true, but there are people in organizations that fail to acknowledge this, and they feel that "writing the custom scripts" instead of buying the overpriced management tool is a better decision, because maintaining their own scripts lets them avoid showing a tangible cost for the management capab
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There's a lot more to vSphere than vMotion.
I'm aware of this... vMotion is cheap anyways; you just need ESS+ or vSphere standard licenses, and a vCenter foundation for vMotion on 3 hosts.
Even if you did go Ent Plus...
Have you people seen the cost of Windows CALs lately? :)
Nested virtualization (Score:3)
Look into solutions that make use of nested virtualization.
If you want to create an IT playground that itself involves virtualization, being able to have nested virtualization will let you use VMs to confine the playground without taking away the VM toys.
VMware hypervisor for virtualization. (Score:2)
I would point the best of breed solution for Tier1 production use, and getting the most out of your hardware: VMware vSphere vCloud Suite.
With other hypervisors, you get less hardware efficiency, because limited/less good overcommit options, more limited ability to efficiently mediate contention, and greater overheads.
Products:
Virtualization hosts: VMware vSphere ESXi Enterprise Plus with Distributed vSwitch -- provides you options that you can use to run production and IT playground side-by-side
Re:VMware hypervisor for virtualization. (Score:5, Insightful)
OP: You can do what you want with a simple install of ubuntu and 20 minutes worth of bash to get a prototype together.
Prototypes are easy; there are a lot of problems you don't have to worry about like bad neighbors on a VM host, or proper failover and reliability considerations.
The author said secure and manageable.
It's hard to imagine something as less manageable than "You have to write your own code" just to even get a working prototype.
And it's hard to imagine something less secure from an availability perspective than... "I just cobbled together some ad-hoc failover code in bash"
The OP question is too vague (Score:2)
check cisco stuff (Score:2)
Someone - I think Cisco - has a server based application very similar to Cisco's PacketTracer - server based virtualization for both machines and networking equipment. Forget the name of it though.
Eucalyptus (Score:2)
I'd suggest taking a look at Eucalyptus [eucalyptus.com], an open-source cloud management system that's compatible with the Amazon EC2 APIs and thus pretty easy to script and automate for production resources and any of the students who want to play with features like on-demand load balancing.
Difficult question (Score:2)
The one your distro recommends, take it from there (Score:3)
That's easy: Choose the one your distro of choice recommends - I'm presuming you're using Linux here.
Otherwise I'd recommend you switch to it before virtualising things - my fairly safe blind guess is that the custom-virtualisation-setup-community is by far the largest for x86 Linux.
If you run into troubles you can't get a grip on, start switching through the ones the most helpful people in the forums/irc channels you're using recommend.
Good luck.
SmartOS for sure (Score:2)
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Pretend the last sentence or two weren't there. Then how would you answer the question? That might help the OP and community at large.
Re:If you have to ask /. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ah fuck off. It's actually a good and interesting question to see what the various specialists come up with.
Re: If you have to ask /. (Score:2)
The trouble is - all specialists have to say - you shouldn't ask this question!!!!111/yes you suould!!!!!1111
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Nah, it's called getting a set of basic user requirements and then looking through a set of products to see which match the list.
"That worked so well!!", said no one who ever did that ever.
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Ah fuck off. It's actually a good and interesting question to see what the various specialists come up with.
Nah, it's called getting a set of basic user requirements and then looking through a set of products to see which match the list. This just reeks of laziness and namedropping on slashdot so someone will post the solution for you.
By the way, I'm looking for a toaster on linux, it needs to be able to have 6 settings, usuable by many people (including students). I need to be able to develop toast on it, but it also needs to run an operational toasting environment, preferably on the same hardware. I would like it to be fully scriptable, and I need to be able to hook it up to an LDAP. It would be nice if it came included with a coffeemachine, which should also be fully scriptable. I've found the Coffee HOWTO [tldp.org], but haven't bothered reading it. Could you guys give me an opinion on how to adapt this to my toaster project? I've looked at relays, resistors and capacitors... They all seem very nice.
Please spend a little more time reading the manuals and typing in a few requests in Google before posting this to Ask Slashdot: be a bit more professional.
Fuck it, karma to burn anyway.
You could try doing a little basic research before posting your question.
Here's a toaster that meets more of your requirements, though it runs NetBSD rather than Linux:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1018836/toaster-pc-runs-bsd-makes-toast [theinquirer.net]
Let us know if that doesn't meet your requirements for some reason, there may be some NetBSD packages that can do what you need.
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We don't like muffins around here. We want no muffins, no toast, no teacakes, no buns, baps, baguettes or bagels, no croissants, no crumpets, no pancakes, no potato cakes and no hot-cross buns and definitely no smegging flapjacks. [youtube.com]
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// to do: Pentium 4 joke goes here
Re:If you have to ask /. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you have to be so arrogant and pretend to know what is best without research or asking other I.T. professionals then I have to say you are not doing yours and neither are the moderators who made this +4??
Stating that you are not qualified is also highly insulting and ruins the quality of candid discussion on Slashdot that I do like and enjoy reading the comments.
In fact regardless of the field I do not know of anyone who is competent who does not look to others with more expertise in a specific area for opinions. No matter how badass you think you are at your job there is always someone who knows more than you. Especially in a particularly area such as this case virtualization.
Re:If you have to ask /. (Score:4, Insightful)
Gotta step in somewhere.
My first response halfway through Gonzalez' post was "Oh, yeah, he's an instructor, maybe at a community college, and he's in charge of getting this thing up and running." Next thought, "He's done no homework other than learning the names of some virtualization methods/engines and wants the smart folks on /. to do it for him." Clinched with the last two sentences.
Then, before delving into all the helpful posts thus far, I figured it was also possible he'd done a bit of swotting up and reached the point where he's brain-burnt, confused and maybe over his head. As another here has said, simply trying to use Google to get to sources for decent advice or real infos can be... disheartening.
Finally, since we all plopped out of the womb knowing little more than how to suck, poop, and cry, it's not unreasonable to ask those who might know more, or who've been in the same boat, for any useful info, pointers, advices, which lead him to right here and now.
Now to continue reading, see if anything interesting and useful shows up.
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so I got to the end, and /.ers stepped up. Nice!
I never did any of this for a living, only a few classes, and very little of it for a hobby as time allows, only use VirtualBox for my own stuff, having tried several of the other end-user solutions over the past few years. Already got hipped to some neat things I'd not heard of - proxmox, chef, vagrant, ovirt, jenkins, etc. Don't know what OP gets from it, but I have some reading to do.
I'd be interested to see what Gonzalez ends up doing.
From those who rea
Re:If you have to ask /. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Even if it's just for students to play with: If you have to ask us, then you're not qualified to do your job."
You seem to suffer under the impression that US schools have the money to hire top specialists.
Re:If you have to ask /. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah it's those who know without asking (Score:2)
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it never hurts to ask and get more information. The submitter didn't phrase it like he/she is going entirely by what /. says.
Re:If you have to ask /. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't agree. There is nothing really unique to virtualization, it's just really interdisciplinary, storage, network engineering, wintel admin, Linux admin, physical datacenter management, etc on these scales. Nothing anyone who has been in IT for awhile and worn a few hats in that time can't be expected to do so reading and then get started.
It is a useful question to ask though, at least several of the products mentioned can likely meet his needs, there are qualitative and technical differences and soliciting some info on he experience of others, to help direct his research effort is not unreasonable
Re:If you have to ask /. (Score:4)
I don't agree. There is nothing really unique to virtualization, it's just really interdisciplinary, storage, network engineering, wintel admin, Linux admin, physical datacenter management, etc on these scales. Nothing anyone who has been in IT for awhile and worn a few hats in that time can't be expected to do so reading and then get started.
If he had those discplines and skills then I doubt he would be asking slashdot. Seriously if you need to ask slashdot the question he asked then he is unlikely to have the skillset to implemet ANY of the solutions in a well managed way.
Re:If you have to ask /. (Score:4, Insightful)
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But the force of the 10% disagreement is 9 times that of the agreement, leaving me stymied.
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How is requesting third-party opinions NOT part of doing research?
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Shit, replied to wrong comment. My karma, kill it.
Re:If you have to ask /. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or an expert for that matter?
I have setup VMware before but I sure as hell would ask others before I put live production and recommend an expensive solution and put my job on the line for 100 users. Google will show just search engine optimized crap of people trying to see stuff anyway and it is hard to tell which is real and which is a fake website pulling data from another designed to pimp up the ratings of a 2nd website.
Windows 7 forums are copied by bots all the time and put in fake ad/malware ridden sites with links to someone trying to sell something to get a higher Google SEO rating whenever I try to search for something technical. It is annoying.
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I like VMWare for larger installations as well. We also have special requirements, specifically we need GPUs. Until recently, that meant offloading that work to real hardware, but nVidia GRID is a godsend because we can install that part on the VMWare server (this is still in beta at my company, so I don't yet personally have access to it, but I've seen demos and I have to do the multi-server setup by hand and that is no fun).
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He might even be held hostage by a PHB who expects him to be a miracle worker.
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Hi! I'm your Slashdot assistant! I see you have misused the word "advise".
"Advise" is a verb. You advise someone on some subject matter.
"Advice" is a noun. You give someone advice.
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Re:Vagrant and Jenkins and Virtual Box (Score:5, Funny)
Take a look at using Jenkins which is a continuous integration builder but can be customized to just bring up VMS as needed.
VMS? Cool!!
$ DEFINE/SYSTEM LNK$LIBRARY $DISK1:[PLAYGROUND]STARTER_EXAMPLES
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/trans=(conc)
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OpenStack is new, but still relatively immature.
I would have say that 8 months ago. Now, with the latest release (code name Grizzly, version 2013.1.x), we are up to a very good level, with quantum finally working correctly. For storage, I would suggest Ceph rather than Swift + Cinder. Thomas
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yes they're nice for the software written for them, but most would prefer x86-64 based solution to gene amdahl's architecture now emulated by mutant powerpc. yes I'm aware of the x86 blades that can go into z expansion cabinet, but that's silly if primary need is x86
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nothing nonsensical about specifying instruction set, we're talking about people wanting virtualization solutions for software already written, and most are not runnable, or are too cost prohibitive on ibm mainframe (trying licensing oracle and see how many megabucks that goes)
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