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OpenStack as a SolusVM alternative ?
leapswitch
Patron Provider, Veteran
in Providers
It looks like Ramnode is moving, and Fleio is nearing stable, what are your thoughts on OpenStack as an alternative to manage the VM infrastructure ?
We use -
SolusVM - OpenVZ + KVM
Hyper-V - Manual setups + inhouse automation
Bare Metal servers - Manual + PXE setups
Would it be possible to move the above infrastructure to OpenStack. A central management for worldwide infrastructure as well as additional functionality sounds promising.
Ishan
Comments
Yes, is the simple answer.
I second Anthony's reply. It's going to be hard to setup, though. But it's going to be worth it.
Im investigating openstack myself for use but with some newer tech. You really don't need all the cloud abilities, but it can do everything solus does at a basic level and can be extended.
LXC scares me. It's possible they got their shit together for it but I just felt uneasy when I spent time researching it.
Maybe someone put together an OpenVZ module but given people brag about how it's over 1.5 million lines of code i'd hate to be the maintainer for that.
Francisco
What I hate about OVZ is you can not run docker at all on the same node. It just isn't modern enough. You can atleast use LXC mode in docker and have them in 1 node.
Honestly OpenVZ being stagnant and LXC scaring me like it does is what drove me to move on with the KVM Slices. I was tired of hearing customers be upset at the old kernel or lack of support for XYZ but they couldn't budget what our original KVM lineup was priced at.
Francisco
OpenStack can be installed to deploy VMs with local storage (in the same compute node)? Or is forced to use a remote NFS block storage?
I can't really see OpenStack as an alternative to SolusVM. OpenStack just doesn't lend itself to the "traditional VPS" that is so simple with SolusVM. Also, even for a barebones OpenStack setup, it is not easy to get running.
Then once it is working for you, hope nothing goes wrong. It is not intuitive to find and fix issues with OpenStack.
What are KVM slices?
https://buyvm.net/kvm-dedicated-server-slices
Anyway, It's quite possible I was following old information at the time but I thought that tun/tap/ipsec didn't work in unpriv'd containers?
Francisco
@jminger - you can run OpenStack on local storage.
@vapornode - While it's true that OpenStack is harder to debug, it's not impossible. They've gone a long way the past couple of years, from what I hear.
While possibly the ovz module is not the best, KVM one works pretty fine. As far as I know, it's the most commonly used hypervisor in openstack.
@AlexBarakov That's true, not impossible. Just difficult.
I've had to work with deploying and maintaining OpenStack for customers as an implementation of a private cloud. It gets difficult to maintain when you need to scale it and I just don't see people using OpenStack as an alternative to SolusVM when the work involved is so much greater.
@vaportnode - here's your difference. You deployed it as an implementation of a private cloud. Under my definition, clouds should be HA, self healing with NAS or some kind of distributed storage. This is where it get's complicated. If you run OpenStack as single node, with local storage, it should, on theory, be much easier to maintain.
I completely second the opinion that when it breaks, it breaks much harder than solus/ovz. However in a perfect world, it shouldn't break that often. And to look from the other side - there is a huge percent of new hosting providers, who have 0 idea on what they are doing, from sys admin point of view, meaning that when solus breaks down (say, a slave server, KVM based), they will most likely have no clue on how to fix it as well.
So a "slice" is just a dedicated cpu resource rather than overcommitted? Just a marketing name for a kvm box?
Sure
Dedicated resources with bandwidth being fair share unmetered very soon.
Francisco
I would recommend instead Cloudstack for alternative to SolusVM as to me Cloudstack stands out to be almost/about the same in functionality as SolusVM has since by nature Cloudstack was made for "cloud"/web hosting.
I'm currently testing proxmox cloud and it seems to be working for all my needs, may not be an alternative to anything above but works great.
Many clients seem to control the servers entirely from our WHMCS. It would be great to see some more Openstack-WHMCS integration
And they don't have them in Europe so it's really an incomplete 'service'. But that's me just being bitter...
It's possible, but... Will be costly. There's a lot of programming involved.
@MrGenteral I guess that's our only hold up...from a provider standpoint. From an admin standpoint, the capabilities are no comparison.
Indeed. If I was a provider I would simply create a custom panel, billing, support and VPS management.
when troubleshooting openstack system, its a must to imagine a virtual router, network and switch in there. you guys ever try openNebula? perhaps i'll try openNebula this month. hope no more pain like openstack does (icehouse)
Not for a starting point. The bare minimum is create/terminate/suspend/unsuspend/statistics for WHMCS to be completely honest.
OpenStack isn't an out-of-the-box solution to build a public cloud or VPS hosting service. It's more like a tool box, that can help you to build your own solution. But you should be aware that some tools in this box are of low quality while others are completely missing.
Tools like Fuel might help you to get OpenStack up and running, but a migration from SolusVM to OpenStack will probably be very hard and expensive. As others said before, Cloudstack or OpenNebula might be a better choice.
Once you get the fundamentals sorted out w/ OpenStack, there's no problem to scale out, manage or troubleshoot. Not recommended for a small host though and definitely not an alternative to SolusVM considering the effort needed to setup a fault tolerant stack.
We find OpenNebula to be superior to OpenStack in terms of simplicity, and user friendly. OpenStack is built for corporations in mind while OpenNebula is built for users in mind. OpenStack is composed of different projects where-as OpenNebula is turnkey (all in one solution).
Both OpenStack & OpenNebula support a variety of storage solutions (Ceph, LVM, etc.) where-as SolusVM only supports LVM (Local, Non-redundant storage). This is only ONE of many features that OpenStack/OpenNebula support that SolusVM does not.
Both OpenStack & OpenNebula are open, where-as SolusVM is close sourced which can sometimes lead to exploits (Which is what happened with our previous hosting business - one of the reasons we started building http://virtengine.com )
VirtEngine is a solution for hosting providers to build Public Clouds ontop of OpenNebula, which will also be integrated with OpenStack/Proxmox/CloudStack in the future. VirtEngine itself also comes with a community edition (OpenSource) that can be utilized to build private clouds.
Being OpenSource means anyone can catch exploits, depreciated code, or un-optimized code - and when you have hundreds of corporations that crucially depend on the software - one will end up fixing it ASAP.
Comparison of OpenStack & OpenNebula
Curious, what license will it be released under? I don't think you've said anything about this before :P
More details please. Where to download? And what limitations? Any feature comparison to the proprietary product?