Virtual Machine Manager

[feratechinc]

There are a slew of different Open Source technologies available. Especially in the area of servers and office management.

I see a lot of projects try to expand their functionality and in many cases the project development slows down because resources become scare and plagued with bugs.

Especially one of the best tools would easily be a web based Virtual Machine Manager for QEMU or any other open source VM.

Just imagine being able to easily add functionality to your server by downloading a Virtual Machine and setting it up through Zentyal. Adding different Voip Distros, Thin Client, Exchange Server and many other possibilties.

Then Zentyal development can focus on LDAP integration between VMs which would allot Zentyal to spend more time improving the core and adding necessary functions and leaving users with an easy way to expand their own functionality.

[half_life]

My solution was to make Zentyal a virtual machine.  Take a look herehttp://code.osuosl.org/projects/ganeti-webmgr.  This works with KVM and Xen.  What you are describing is essentially where I am at.  I use Convirt to d/l and configure a VM that can be managed via virt-manager and ganeti.  There are several other web based tools out there including Convirt2 depending on your needs.  For me ganeti fulfils the High Availability part of my needs.

[feratechinc]

I have considered making Zentyal a VM. However, the most important part of Zentyal we use is the failover WAN and firewall.

So our ideal setup is to have Zentyal as the main PC. I am looking into Ganeti right now.

We are using Ubuntu 10.4LTS servers with Zentyal loaded on top. It's great software I just wish a lot of these projects worked better together.

Would be nice if Zentyal had it's own VM manager.

[half_life]

Almost the same situation here.  Zentyal is the gateway.  I am currently building machine two to add to the fleet.  Xen is loaded on top of Debian  with no services running except ssh and ntp.  It has a public and private ip address assigned.  Zentyal is loaded as a VM with a public and private ip address.  All traffic comes through Zentyal unless it is ssh to the Dom0 (Xen speak for base operating system).  Ganeti controls what happens if machine A (I call it Heckle) falls down.  When Jeckle (machine B) is complete it would jump into action when Heckle or any of it's VMs disappear.  Zentyal and the other VM's would pick up where they left off on Jeckle .  I have tested this on small systems and am currently deploying it for production.  Heckle/Jeckle provide Gateway + VM'ed Win2008r2 application server and soon will replace our PDC and SQL server.  It looks like I will be running a separate Asterisk server vm'ed as well. This all forms the backbone of service for a transit system with predictive arrival/next stop + automatic vehicle location + public facing web-portal and IVR system.  I suggest testing it out on small iron and see for yourself.  I used a couple of Workstations with middle of the road  cpus + a couple of gigs and a 1T hard drive

[Plecebo]

off topic
half_life:

I'd like to chat with you more about your transit setup, as I currently work for a largish trasit agency and we have experienced some pains implementing some of the features you mentioned. if you are up for sharing your knwledge/experience could you contact me? larry at schwerzler dot com

[feratechinc]

We are currently looking into using:
http://www.convirture.com/products_opensource.php

along side Zentyal

Hopefully this will give us the functionality we need. As we work on this we will post progress.

[half_life]

I assume that you are talking about the convirt 2 product.  It is a good product and is not too hard to implement.  I went about it the easy way.  I installed convirt 1 then used the import appliance function to install convirt 2.  Very straight forward and quick.  I am using Xen for the hypervisor instead of KVM to facilitate HA functions.  Most would probably be happy with KVM.  Fast response guys,  thanks!

[half_life]

off topic
half_life:

I'd like to chat with you more about your transit setup, as I currently work for a largish trasit agency and we have experienced some pains implementing some of the features you mentioned. if you are up for sharing your knwledge/experience could you contact me? larry at schwerzler dot com

Email sent via work. 

[chunk.one]

For one or two virtual machines I like VirtualBox and phpVirtualBox.

VirtualBox:
www.virtualbox.org

phpVirtualBox:
http://code.google.com/p/phpvirtualbox/

For sure, it doesn't feel professional. But it's working, it's easy to setup und remote access isn't a problem, if http(s) access is allowed.

VirtualBox can access iSCSI and can switch to another VirtualBox on-the-fly, if the machines does have access to the same iSCSI server.

[feratechinc]

Actually I came across phpvirtualbox.

However, I couldn't get it to work.

Which version of virtualbox are you using? We are using Virtualbox OSE 3.2.8 and there was a package missing so we couldn't get phpvirtualbox to connect.

[chunk.one]

There are only few dependencies needed:
http://code.google.com/p/phpvirtualbox/wiki/WebServerAndPHPInstall

Maybe this helps for 3.2.8 OSE:
http://code.google.com/p/phpvirtualbox/wiki/Installation
(I used 3.x + phpvirtualbox before, now I'm on VirtualBox 4.0.4)

VirtualBox Webservice must be running. There is an howto:
http://code.google.com/p/phpvirtualbox/wiki/vboxwebServiceConfigLinux

Don't forget to enable advanced settings (very cool features):
http://code.google.com/p/phpvirtualbox/wiki/AdvancedSettings

I hope this helps.

Just one correction to my other posting:
> remote access isn't a problem, if http(s) access is allowed.

Port 3389 must be accessable too!

[massimo]

hello guys,

I installed ubuntu with this wonderful distro zentyal, I find it a very good, among the many things I wanted to create a virtual machine with windows xp prof, but I could not, someone can give me a hand?

thanks