Open source data center virtualization with OpenNebula
Cloud Control
Everybody is talking about cloud these days, and everybody seems convinced that they will not survive the next two years without a cloud solution. At the same time, administrators in many enterprises haven't even taken the first steps toward virtualization. Although virtualization and cloud computing work hand in hand in many people's opinions, the underlying strategic approach is not actually mandatory. If a major service provider were to install a bare metal system on every machine it bought, this wouldn't initially contradict the idea of accessing virtual services as the need arises over a network.
The requirements in terms of dynamic change and availability, however, soon reach their limits with this kind of solution. Besides the rather abstract IaaS services, which you can purchase, increasing administrative overhead is the greatest motivator for searching for a central administrative entity and the basic services that it provides.
Overview
Many of the frameworks available on the market today have been in development for years, and some excellent solutions have been produced. The OpenNebula framework [1] that I will look at in this article is probably the most popular framework for data center virtualization – along with Eucalyptus and OpenStack, or the Nova computing stack to be more precise.
The most important difference between OpenNebula and the other frameworks that I mentioned is the that OpenNebula sees itself more as a toolkit than as an all-in-one solution, and this is precisely what makes using this software framework so attractive. In the heterogeneous legacy data center field, doing a complete rebuild and having an empty site as the basis for the solutions that you deploy is virtually impossible.
Storage and virtualization concepts are often already established, and the use of them is second nature. What
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