Free Virtualization Clusters and Breadboards, Hak5 1718

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• published: 18 Dec 2014
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Free Open Source Virtualization cluster platforms that rival our old favorite, Proxmox VE - Darren reports. Plus, Shannon's breadboarding with Arduino. All that and more, this time on Hak5! Building Virtualization Clusters A while back we built a high performance virtualization cluster using the open source Proxmox VE. It's a hypervisor, similar to VMware's vSphere, Microsoft's Windows Hyper-V or Citrix XenServer. Mostly it's a nice front-end to the KVM and OpenVZ virtualization technologies. Since I last looked at Proxmox they've changed their model a bit, and there's an additional subscription service to get access to the stable branch. It's still GPL and you can find the code on their git repo, but it's sort of a pain now. Thankfully their community edition starts at just 4 Euros, but this led me - as along with many others - to look for alternatives. Since we're going to need some servers here at the new Hak5 warehouse given that we have some 600 Mbit and 52 static IPs being installed (long story but it's the only way we're getting service at all here) - we're going to have to fill out ye olde server rack. The most efficient way to do this is with virtualization since virtual machines do a way better job of utilizing resources and making things like storage and scalability and backups with snapshots so much easier. Recapping from last time we went down this road, virtualization wise I'm keen on two technologies that Proxmox does a good job of managing. KVM or Kernel-based Virtual Machine basically turns the Linux kernel into a hypervisor. It's been around since 2007 and it's awesome at using your hardwares virtualization extensions like Intel's VT-x or AMD-V. It's great for running multiple Operating Systems like OSX and FreeBSD and Linux and Windows all on top of this one VM infrastructure. OpenVZ is the other virtualization technology I'm keen on, and it's more of a virtualized environment than a proper hypervisor. So you can't run OSX and Winods in addition to Linux - it's just straight linux. On the plus side this means all the OpenVZ virtual machines run on top of the same Linux Kernel and so overhead is kept to a minimum making the whole system pretty zippy. It also means that unline KVM where you have to allocate different chunks of memory to each VM, with OpenVZ you can share memory across all the VMs. So both KVM and OpenVZ have their pros and cons but when paired they make a pretty great team, which is why tools like Proxmox VE exist to add a nice management front-end to these awesome tools. The first two I'm interested in as alternatives to Proxmox are oVirt and OpenNode. oVirt is pretty cool in that it can be installed as an all in one hypervisor or installed on top of your distro of choice, such as Fedora Core, RedHat, Centos, Gentoo or Debian. I'm testing out their live version which is based on CentOS. So far I must say it seems quite polished. There's features for live migration of servers, built in templates for various operating systems, plenty of storage options like NFS, iSCSI, and GlusterFS, even USB passthrough. So much like Proxmox VE you can cluster a bunch of oVirt nodes each sharing resources. I've only begun playing with oVirt but it seems like it fits the bill. I still want to check out OpenNode - which seems similar. Anyway, I just wanted to share with you the beginnings of this project - there's still a lot to do between setting up storage system and all the nodes be it OpenNode or oVirt or, well what do you like? Hit me up feedback@hak5.org, and hey, maybe when we get all this together we'll start offering shells.