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Ask slashdot: Which 100+ User Virtualization Solution Should I Use?
Gonzalez_S writes "Let's say you need to give access to 100+ users to create their own virtual machines and devices (eg. switches, .., ms windows or linux family) in a manageable and secure way. Which virtualization solution would you choose? There are vmware, xen, kvm, .. based solutions, but which one would you prefer and why? The solution should be stable, manageable, scriptable and preferably have ldap integration. In this case I also need to setup a playground for IT students, next to hosting production servers on the same system."
Why not work with AWS to setup a "private cloud" sandbox? Reserved instances can keep your costs relatively flat, and the AWS crew seems pretty amenable to helping out when it comes to unique needs...
vmware is cheaper and easier to set up
Citrix is a lot more expensive and a PITA to set up but a lot faster since Windows 7 and later has native citrix code in it for virtualization and a lot more customization
Considering that you are likely out of an educational institution, Microsoft likely provides you with free licenses for their products. As such, Hyper-V and SystemCenter would provide you with a fairly good experience that is easy to manage and automatically deploy based off of Active Directory. It is a solution that will likely meet all of your stated requirements and your other likely needs and wants in a package that is "good enough".
If you have a budget, consider VMware's vSphere offering. It can get pretty expensive (license costs greater than that of your physical hardware) however it is currently best-in-class and provides some truly amazing administration tools.
Thirty four characters live here.
Ah fuck off. It's actually a good and interesting question to see what the various specialists come up with.
It's free and offers higher performance than VMWare (which as far as ESXi 5 goes) sucks.
You can create users with privilege levels as expected and you may also cluster several servers together (as you can with other solutions).
You can also do containers OR a full virtual machine depending upon the OS you are trying to emulate.
Give this a shot before paying for any of the software others have recommended. Our company has switched all virtualized servers to run on Proxmox hosts and the uptime is 100% with MANY users.
End of story, everything else here is overkill. KVM sounds just about right for your needs and is very stable and FREE.
You can provide people with a variety of images and single command to deploy them (without root). It's not even that hard to setup. The hard part really is setting up an LDAP server to meet your needs.
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Xen with paravirtualized guests would be stable and scale well, as I understand it. There is Xen Center to do this, or you could get the new Debian 7, which is supposed to have good support for that out of the box as well. It has good manageability as I understand it.
But yeah, I'd be of the inclination to do your research rather than have us make the choice for you. We can only offer suggestions, but you need a good idea of what you want to do too. For example, IT students often don't have a good understanding of Linux, despite what you'd think.
There are a lot of options, and the OP is just asking for a general structure. Classic /. community fail to assume we are even dealing with someone that will be doing with implementation. This could be the director trying to get a ballpark before sinking their teeth in or a under-paid teacher, with little time, whto wants to make their students' learning environment better. I was the only one with a VPS in my classes, and thus the only one, in the end, who actually knew how to get anything done, outside of theory.
My rant to /. is over. Now to answer the OP:
The easiest way to get started would be Xen Cloud Platform + Citrix Xen Center. That alone will get you a free robust virtual hosting environment, but this will require you to set up a few VM templates and manually deploy to students. You can take this one step further by using OpenStack + XCP which will give you an API which you can use to build a web-front for student deployment. Some might already exist, but all the ones I am aware of are built around payment models.
As for users managing switches, I have no clue and good luck there. IMHO, I would VLAN and let OpenStack manage it. You can use the US Navy's network simulator to teach concepts if you like. It even allows using tools like wireshark for real-world analysis experience.
Good luck, I hope you use this to make students more ready for the real world.
The specific virtualization system you use doesn't really matter. You're looking for ways to manage it.
If you want to run your own cluster, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack , specifically the Nova, Quantum, and Keystone components.
If you want to do it efficiently you might also want to consider using it as a service. Other people are already selling OpenStack on a massive scale with levels of efficiency that you'll never touch. Rent what you need, see what works, and then start building your own in-house when (or if) you find things you need to improve.
www.ovirt.org
Full VM solution, for free. What more do you want. Easy to setup, easy to use, easy to control. It has LDAP integration.
Our central infrastructure is on Hyper-V at work now on account of VMWare wanting way too much money. We use a lot of RHEL systems and they all work well. Our web server, MySQL server, puppet server, that sort of thing all run on Hyper-V. The Linux admin didn't have much trouble with it. The main limitation I'm aware of is that you can't do dynamic memory.
While it isn't ad Linux friendly as VMWare, it seems to work just fine. As to which between them you should use, depends on features and price. In our case Hyper-V was "free" since we have software assurance with MS campus wide and VMWare wanted like $20,000 per system for vSphere with the feature set we wanted, so it was stacked heavily to Hyper-V. You case may be different, so make sure to check out both.
However don't write off Hyper-V because it is MS. With Server 2012 it is a real, no-shit, enterprise virtualization solution that works well and has loads of good features. They fixed their rubbish networking from 2008R2 also, their virtual switches are exceedingly fast, and it supports full SR-IOV if your NICs do.
I was very pleased when I tried it out, our Linux admin liked it, so we migrated (we had an old VMWare 3 setup). Migrating VMs was easy too. Uninstall VMWare tools, use the Starwind converter to go from vmdk to vhd, use Hyper-V to go from vhd to vhdx (and make it fixed size), set up a VM, start it, and install the integration services.