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[Xen-users] Graphical virtualisation management system

To: XEN Mailing List <xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Xen-users] Graphical virtualisation management system
From: Freddie Cash <fjwcash@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 11:32:32 -0700
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What is everyone using to manage their virtualisation setup?  Anyone
using a pre-packaged management system like ConVirt, oVirt,
Virt-Manager, etc?  Everyone rolling their own management scripts?
Something else?

Right now, we're using our home-grown kvmctl script (as seen in the
KVM wiki) to manage KVM-based VMs on Debian and Ubuntu Server.  It's
working ok, but limited to a single host, so there's no redundancy or
shared storage or migration possible in our current setup.

We want to move to a multi-tiered, SAN-based virtualisation setup, but
can't find a VM management tool that handles both KVM and Xen (we have
some old Opteron hardware that doesn't support SVM), and does not
require Linux from end-to-end.  For example, we want to run FreeBSD +
ZFS on our storage servers, exporting storage via iSCSI (or NFS).  We
want to run a minimal Debian/Ubuntu install on the VM hosts (just to
boot and run the management agents), with all of the VMs getting their
storage via iSCSI.  With a separate box acting as the management
system.  Preferably with a web-based management GUI, but that's more
of an "nice to have" than a hard requirement.

>From the research I've done into the VM management systems available
for KVM/Xen, either Linux is required on every host (including the
storage servers), or they don't support iSCSI (or off-server shared
storage of any kind), or they require an X server installed, or they
only support one of Xen/KVM, or they are geared toward managing a
single server (desktop).

So, if you have a setup similar to above (multiple physical servers,
separate storage, etc), what are you using to manage it?  Is it free,
open-source, shareware, pay-ware, proprietary, abandonware, something
else?

So far, I've looked at:
  * Convirture 2.0 which looks pretty, but doesn't work with iSCSI,
and the docs are all horribly out-of-date making it very hard to
troubleshoot;
  * oVirt which requires Fedora/CentOS/RedHat on everything;
  * virt-manager which requires X and seems to be more desktop-oriented;
  * ProxMox which doesn't support Xen.

What else is available?  Where else should I be looking?

Any suggestions on what to look at greatly appreciated.  Any
suggestions on how to improve our setup also greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwcash@xxxxxxxxx

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