ganeti and KVM Virtualization

We’ve been using KVM Virtualization for almost 2 years now and we’re happy with it. But as the number of hypervisors & VM instances increases, so is the complexity of server management which can be frustrating at times.

I realized that we have to find a way to manage it somehow.  I’ve been scouring the net for possible solutions. I’ve read about OpenStack & Eucalyptus but the disparity of deploying VM instances against our current deployment is big that migrating one will be difficult.

I have 6 requirements for the target platform:

1. cost
2. centralized management
3. learning curve / ease of deployment
4. migration constraints (lesser, the better)
5. performance / high availability
6. community support

My boss forwarded me this blog about ganeti a few months ago. I was skeptical to try it at first because deployment was debian-centric. We’re using CentOS so that could be a problem. But after reading the documentation + mailing-lists, I realized that migrating to ganeti will be less painful than other solutions (in theory), so I decided to install a test cluster and ran it for a few weeks.

Testing phase is over and ganeti is promising (drbd + live migration rocks!). Our current cluster has 5 nodes but that will surely change as we go into full production 🙂

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