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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."
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.
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Opinions are a great thing to gather when building any type of system no matter how experienced you are. People stand shit up all the time that they aren't 100% familiar with and in this day and age products can change drastically. Do you really expect OP to know everything about every possible virtualization product? I don't see anywhere in his post that he is asking for anything more than an opinion. He doesn't even state that he needs one, he's simple asking for peer feedback. Instead he gets asshat responses from the internets...
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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I don't agree. There is nothing really unique to virtualization, it's just really interdisciplinary, storage, network engineering, wintel admin, Linux admin, physical datacenter management, etc on these scales. Nothing anyone who has been in IT for awhile and worn a few hats in that time can't be expected to do so reading and then get started.
It is a useful question to ask though, at least several of the products mentioned can likely meet his needs, there are qualitative and technical differences and soliciting some info on he experience of others, to help direct his research effort is not unreasonable
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Or an expert for that matter?
I have setup VMware before but I sure as hell would ask others before I put live production and recommend an expensive solution and put my job on the line for 100 users. Google will show just search engine optimized crap of people trying to see stuff anyway and it is hard to tell which is real and which is a fake website pulling data from another designed to pimp up the ratings of a 2nd website.
Windows 7 forums are copied by bots all the time and put in fake ad/malware ridden sites with links to someone trying to sell something to get a higher Google SEO rating whenever I try to search for something technical. It is annoying.
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Full VM solution, for free. What more do you want. Easy to setup, easy to use, easy to control. It has LDAP integration.