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Internal Clouds

Creating a private cloud for internal use can be challenging. The documentation provided by the vendor can range from terse to absent, and the chances of a mistake are greatly increased as you scale up the number of actual servers. 

Why aren't there any books on this?

I have been setting up a small set of virtual servers for use in house as a development lab. I experimented with Ubuntu's offering, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, but they neglect to mention that their system can only host a KVM based virtual machine. If you want a XEN based system, it cannot directly host the mode 0 operating system without recompiling the OS. This is not impossible, it's just hard, and the path is poorly laid out. The UEC management is similar to that used by Amazon, giving this some advantages if the deployment environment is based on Amazon's cloud. I will likely describe my experiences in a future post.

Unfortunately, we were aiming at Rackspace's cloud. Theirs is based on a Xen virtual management system. When I first looked into that, it seemed like it was going to be far too expensive for our simple deployment. When it was shown to me that they are offering the base system, XenServer for free, I thought it was too good to be true. It wasn't. This advanced virtualization system is available for the cost of signing up and requesting a license. Unbelievable.

Coming up....

How to deploy a XenServer