Private Cloud Control

[Takx]

Hello There,

I'm designing a way to our company to manage our future CentOS linux hypervisors (KVM) on different places (we are going to migrate old free xenserver hypervisors to KVM), something like a private cloud, I'm not going to use the resources like cluster or anything, but I need a one place to check for all the healthy and info about the hosts / hypervisors and VMs, so I can do maintenance and backup control from one place.

So far in my research I'm taking a look on oVirt, does anyone have experience with it for multiple sites control? I only used it on local network, and with only 1 host, and I enjoyed it.

I was checking on OpenStack as well, but it does add all the cloud policies and stuff to the complexity, not a problem if it is the only free solution, anyone with experience with it on this scenario?


Thanks!

 

[The Valeyard]

Hello There,

I'm designing a way to our company to manage our future CentOS linux hypervisors (KVM) on different places (we are going to migrate old free xenserver hypervisors to KVM), something like a private cloud, I'm not going to use the resources like cluster or anything, but I need a one place to check for all the healthy and info about the hosts / hypervisors and VMs, so I can do maintenance and backup control from one place.

So far in my research I'm taking a look on oVirt, does anyone have experience with it for multiple sites control? I only used it on local network, and with only 1 host, and I enjoyed it.

I was checking on OpenStack as well, but it does add all the cloud policies and stuff to the complexity, not a problem if it is the only free solution, anyone with experience with it on this scenario?


Thanks!

With oVirt generally speaking for a production deployment you want the manager node to be in the same datacenter as the hypervisors (preferably within the same segment ). When HA is configured you will want fencing enabled and if a network partition between a hypervisor and the manger occurs it can cause a fencing event that will power cycle the hypervisor. (It does this to ensure that the last known location of the VM has been rebooted to prevent the vm from being started on another hypervisor while it is still running).

oVirt is pretty much a direct competitor to vSphere and HyperV and for straight forward virtualization its a pretty solid choice.

oVirts enterprise version is called Red Hat Virtualization (RHV).

OpenStack is a LOT more than oVirt. For the purposes of these two cents, I will refer to the RDO project as it is probably one of the best choices.

OpenStack is software defined infrastructure and there are way more comprehensive articles / wikis that explain this. Suffice it to say you want openstack if you want strong isolation/tenancy in your environments (think something like an AWS VPC), are interested in infrastructure created and deployed as code (Openstack Heat -- think cloudformation for AWS) want to manage bare metal in addition to virtual machines or have sophisticated storage/networking requirements.

RDO enterprise version is called Red Hat OpenStack Platform.


You mentioned remote/multi sites.. typically you will want a cloud management layer to pull this off .. check out something like ManageIQ for this (Which has an enterprise equivalent called Red Hat Cloudforms). With ManageIQ you can add clusters from multiple datacenter locations and it can manage most of the high level functions from a single pane of glass. ManageIQ integrates with Ansible AWX for incorporating things like playbooks/workflows into service catalogs.

 

[Lix]

XCP-ng - XenServer Based, Community Powered

This is an option as well.

 

[Takx]

With oVirt generally speaking for a production deployment you want the manager node to be in the same datacenter as the hypervisors (preferably within the same segment ). When HA is configured you will want fencing enabled and if a network partition between a hypervisor and the manger occurs it can cause a fencing event that will power cycle the hypervisor. (It does this to ensure that the last known location of the VM has been rebooted to prevent the vm from being started on another hypervisor while it is still running).

oVirt is pretty much a direct competitor to vSphere and HyperV and for straight forward virtualization its a pretty solid choice.

oVirts enterprise version is called Red Hat Virtualization (RHV).

OpenStack is a LOT more than oVirt. For the purposes of these two cents, I will refer to the RDO project as it is probably one of the best choices.

OpenStack is software defined infrastructure and there are way more comprehensive articles / wikis that explain this. Suffice it to say you want openstack if you want strong isolation/tenancy in your environments (think something like an AWS VPC), are interested in infrastructure created and deployed as code (Openstack Heat -- think cloudformation for AWS) want to manage bare metal in addition to virtual machines or have sophisticated storage/networking requirements.

RDO enterprise version is called Red Hat OpenStack Platform.


You mentioned remote/multi sites.. typically you will want a cloud management layer to pull this off .. check out something like ManageIQ for this (Which has an enterprise equivalent called Red Hat Cloudforms). With ManageIQ you can add clusters from multiple datacenter locations and it can manage most of the high level functions from a single pane of glass. ManageIQ integrates with Ansible AWX for incorporating things like playbooks/workflows into service catalogs.

Yeah I'm aware oVirt and Openstack are on a different tier of solution.

I asked about oVirt because I liked it, but like I said, only used on local network up to now, but like you said, it doesn't look like a good implementation for remote site control.

Openstack is probably much more than what I need, much more complex as well.

Will research about ManageIQ, thanks for the advice.

 

[Takx]

XCP-ng - XenServer Based, Community Powered

This is an option as well.

XCP-ng has any kind of cloud solution to integrate it? Heard about it, but is it better than KVM virtualization?

 

[Lix]

XCP-ng has any kind of cloud solution to integrate it? Heard about it, but is it better than KVM virtualization?

https://xen-orchestra.com/

One can check if this ticks enough boxes. Management for xcp-ng.

Better then KVM? I like and use KVM in production, but this is on the table as a possible replacement when the time comes for a refurb. XCP works great in my Nuc lab.

 

[tjk]

I'd run kvm before I ran xen.