We are setting up an 8-machine build farm. Most of these builds need to happen on a specific flavor of Linux (Fedora 10 as of now), while some of them will happen on several different Windows VMs. We were considering using Eucalyptus or the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud to run the Linux VMs, and just have VMWare on a couple of machines dedicated to Windows builds when we need them. However, it seems that OpenNebula would work in a similar fashion, but allow us to have some or all of our nodes running VMware's free (as in beer) ESXi.
So my questions are:
- What do you folks see at the big differences between Eucalyptus and OpenNebula?
- Are there strong reasons to prefer one hypervisor over another? How about VM format? (is KVM easier to use with Fedora, for instance?) Windows support makes ESXi the most likely choice, but I'm wondering if there are any gotchas.
- Does any one system's administration and monitoring make it preferable to the others? We'd likely control them mostly through script interfaces used by our build tool.
Thanks!
As far as question #1, this came up in the OpenNebula mailing list some time ago:
http://lists.opennebula.org/pipermail/users-opennebula.org/2009-July/000551.html
As for question #3, IMHO, I'd say OpenNebula has a much more modular and extensible design (making it, among other things, more script-friendly).
For question #2, all hypervisors have their own set of features, and it's hard to consider which may be more suitable for you.
KVM is in the mainline, which means that you can use linux kernel with the KVM module, and it supports hardware-assisted too for Windows guest.
Xen isn't in the mainline, which means that you have to use xen kernel to run dom0 and domU. It supports hardware-assisted, and has been on the market for a long time.
VMware is a big player. Nothing to say here: if you have your app that's approved with ESX, choose VMware.
As for 2 others, OpenNebula is much more flexible than Eucalyptus.
Got in here by a search and I feel like I want to answer this old question.