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."

Comments

VMWare, Ubuntu and Puppet

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

When my company had to come up with a solution to have all of our developers to develop in an environment that absolutely mimicked the production server we used a combination of VMWare to run a version of the Ubuntu. Puppet made creating all of this really easy. It gave us the ability to completely blow away a machine and reconstitute in very little time.

You cannot mix production and playground

[gweihir]

Virtualization will not isolate them against each other. For example, it is quite easy to saturate I/O from the playground. Then your production performance goes down the drain as well. Also, basically no plain virtualization is really secure, these things are fat too complex. Another reason not to mix different classification levels like production and playground. Maybe if you really, really carefully isolate them with SE-Linux, but then you still have things like VM-to-VM crypto-key leakage.