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minWi
Asked: 2011-10-14 23:14:00 +0800 CST

Replace VMware vSphere infrastructure with open source alternatives?

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We are planning a slow migration from VMware (and third party apps) to open source alternatives (free would be great).

Basically, we want to start with some little cluster lab, then migrate the production environment (35+ ESX, 1500 VMs) in the future (X years, there is no hurry... yet)

Our bet is CentOS/Scientific Linux as the operating system of choice and KVM as the hypervisor.

The vCenter alternative we are thinking about, is Convirt, but we don't know if all the features we use in VMware will be supplied by Convirt (HA, DRS, clustering,...), or we should try some other alternatives (any ideas?)

The monitoring is being replaced by Nagios and the backup/replication will be replaced by some scripting magic.

So, is there anyone who can give us some advices, or in a similar situation?

PS.- This is my first question in serverfault, and my english level is not so good, but I hope the question is understandable.

PS2.- I forgot to mention that we provide also VDIs. And the alternative we've been thinking is Spice.

virtualization kvm-virtualization vmware-vcenter open-source vmware-vsphere

7 Answers

  1. Having recently gone through the same song and dance with my own management ("VMWare is really expensive! Check out what OSS options there are out there.") I have some observations to share.

    • I/O performance does vary by hypervisor, though CPU performance is much less variant.
      • In general, 'thin' provisioning is a great way to dock I/O performance. Some (KVM until very recently) are pretty bad about this.
    • The big three non-VMware alternatives (Xen, KVM, Hyper-V) all have some kind of vMotion-like technology, though there are limits.
    • Some are very sensitive to CPU architectures, and don't allow live-migrations to systems that aren't identical. VSphere gets around this with their "Enhanced vMotion Compatibility" technology that dumbs a cluster down to the lowest CPU architecture in the cluster. Not everything else has something like that. This can be a big barrier to expanding your VM plant.
    • A Hypervisor is only as good as its management console.

    That last point is the big one. It's all well and good to have 150 KVM instances, but without some kind of automation to move machines around it doesn't do you much good. There are many, many OSS and non-OSS orchestration frameworks out there, a lot of them built on Libvirt. Once you've found a hypervisor that works the way you'd like it to, you'll probably spent just as much time if not longer evaluating management frameworks for something that works the way you need it to.

    I've been impressed with CloudStack. It was recently purchased by Citrix, but it's an OSS management framework that (as of a couple months ago at least) has a few features only found in paid frameworks. That said, you do tend to get a much more polished framework when you pay for it; CloudStack is under active development so is rapidly changing.

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  2. I haven't used it myself but there is Proxmox-VE. According to Hak5, it supports a variety of OS's including Windows. It also supports clustering

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  3. Citrix XenServer is an open source hypervisor and might be a good candidate for you.

    There are quite a lot of tools available to manage it, but you may find gaps where you have to spend money where the free/open source tools fall short. However, in comparison to what you get with VMware ESXi, the Free Edition provides quite a bit (Live Migration, for example, comes with the free version of XenServer).

    VDI is free for up to 10 desktops with XenDesktop 5.5 Express Edition (trial, then after 30 days, you need to register to obtain a perpetual free license).

    However, I think at some point, you will need to spend money, especially with a large implementation such as yours. It's one thing to have a host or two and figure, "well I can get away with a handful of scripts or just do this and that by hand" but with 35+ hypervisors, clustering, failover/recovery, provisioning, etc. all (likely) distributed across several teams (and departments, perhaps?), you have some heavy-lifting to do (as you're probably well aware).

    I would also leverage the size of your implementation by engaging with the PR/marketing/communications people wherever you're thinking of going; I can see a juicy case study unfolding here for whatever vendor/organization you decide to go with and they'll likely throw at you all sorts of freebies in service, software, and support to pull this off successfully.

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  4. For small clusters (i.e. < 10 hosts): Proxmox: support KVM and OpenVZ, nice web interface. http://pve.proxmox.com/

    For large clusters: OpenNebula: support KVM, Xen, vmware hypervisors and use standard API (EC2, OCCI). http://opennebula.org/

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  5. Take a look at Hyper-V. Its not open source but it is free and it will get you most of the things you're looking for. I'm currently running a cluster of 3 servers and several dozen CentOS VMs and I'm loving it.

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  6. I am in the middle of testing RHEV 3.0 (Red Hat's virtualization management offering). Not bad so far.

    At the moment it's not Open Source but that is on the roadmap - Red Hat plans to open source the entire management stack in the next year or two.

    It is targeted at both server virt and VDI so would be suitable for your deployment.

    It is not as advanced as vSphere (as RH admits) but the functionality is pretty good.

    Another big advantage for RHEV is it's using KVM and ovirt - no lockin!

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  7. What you describe is a pretty large setup, and the fact that you're also providing VDI, makes RHEV the perfect answer to the question.

    I am of course biased, so don't take my word for it, get in touch with Red Hat.

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