I have a 4 node server that I want to virtualize or use to start building a cloud infrastructure. I want to use either CentOS 5 or 6 on it. What would be the best virtualization or cloud based solution for me?
Here are the specs for my server,
Eight Intel Quad Core 2.5GHz CPUs
64GB DDR2 Fully Buffered RAM
Eight 500GB 7.2K SATA Hard Drives
Four 1 Gbit NICs
Two 550W Power Supplies
Thanks in advance.
Currently there are many open source virtualization or cloud platform. When you say cloud computing I think you are looking for a IaaS system. You can use a cloud solution like OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus. Of course, several pure virtualization softwares can also meet your requirements. For example, XenServer Free edition, oVirt contributed mainly by RedHat, Convirt open source edition. I would strongly recommend XenServer for several reasons.
- It is much more mature than oVirt. XenServer has been existing as a commercial solution for several years. The free edition is open source and powerful.
- It is very easy to deploy. You don't need to install and configure hypervisors like KVM or Xen. XenServer is distributed as an ISO image. Install it as a new OS and everything is ready.
- It is easy to use. XenServer has both command line tools and a GUI tool called XenCenter to manage your VMs. Bad news is that XenCenter is a windows only application
- It is easy to deploy a VM. XenServer provides a lot of built in guest OS templates which make life very much easy to create a new VM.
- Resource pool. Even the free edition allows you to manage multiple nodes in the form of resource pool. A resource pool can contain up to 16 nodes.(Not caused by that it is a free edition. Even the paid editions also have such a limit)