Linux for "cloud computing": Request for Input

[Tom Buskey]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com>wrote:

> On 03/05/2010 02:03 PM, Brian St. Pierre wrote:
> > Virtualization?
>
> Yes, and to drive home that point, this is what's being chosen
> empirically by the extant service providers.  Amazon's EC2 is Xen on
> RHEL.  I seem to recall that Rackspace also went this route.
>
> And if you don't like Xen on RHEL/CentOS you can switch to KVM on RHEL.
>  Or (heaven forbid) VMWare Server on RHEL or VMWare ESX which was
> partially based on RHEL.  Even Xen started life with a big code import
> from Linux.
>
> And if you go the Xen route and decide you really don't like Linux you
> can run Xen on OpenSolaris.  Open Source is good - you can choose Linux
> first and still have good escape routes.
>

Hey, I was going to say that.

VirtualBox is another interesting one.  They demoed moving a running guest
VM (running Solaris I think) from a MacOSX host to a Windows 7 host while
running.

Virtualization means you don't have to reinstall from OEM disks when your
upgrade the server hardware.  Just down the VM, copy the images to the new
server, and start it again.  To the VM running on the host, the network,
storage controller, display, etc don't change.

I think Linux is the best host for VirtualBox right now.  Solaris is
probably the least supported.


Networking
Linux can do vlans, VPN, firewalls in the base install.  Its very flexible
in what you allow to be exposed.


>
> >> >  Any blatant negatives for Linux as a platform?
>
> ZFS is only on *Solaris and FreeBSD (albeit an old one).  Linux doesn't
> yet have a stable, consistent COW filesystem.  Certainly a combination
> of the two is a great win.
>
>
There is FUSE, but I wouldn't use it if I had any choice at all.


> If you assume ZFS for storage virtualization, Linux has the advantage of
> being able to (p)NFS mount the data, so you can do file-level
> snapshotting and data de-duplication.  You could also run Windows-based
> clouds with a ZFS backend, but you'd have to use an iSCSI backend which
> loses the nice snapshotting capabilities and drives everything back to
> the block device level of granularity because Windows doesn't play
> nicely with everybody else.
>

Samba works well here.  ZFS also has a CIFS server built in that does all
the ACLs that Windows needs.

iSCSI for any database where you can't use a file server.

ZFS does deduplication in the pools.  Which means it applies to iSCSI too.
Only on OpenSolaris development b131 and higher or the Sun Storage
appliances.
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