Re: Graphical virtualisation management system

[Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@redhat.com>]

   Hi,

> We want to move to a multi-tiered, SAN-based virtualisation setup, but
> can't find a VM management tool that handles both KVM and Xen (we have
> some old Opteron hardware that doesn't support SVM), and does not
> require Linux from end-to-end.  For example, we want to run FreeBSD +
> ZFS on our storage servers, exporting storage via iSCSI (or NFS).  We
> want to run a minimal Debian/Ubuntu install on the VM hosts (just to
> boot and run the management agents), with all of the VMs getting their
> storage via iSCSI.  With a separate box acting as the management
> system.  Preferably with a web-based management GUI, but that's more
> of an "nice to have" than a hard requirement.

> So far, I've looked at:
>    * oVirt which requires Fedora/CentOS/RedHat on everything;

NFS/iSCSI being hosted on non-linux shouldn't be a problem I think, at 
least the underlying libvirt handles this just fine and I can't see a 
reason why oVirt shouldn't (don't know oVirt in detail although I've 
played with it a bit a while ago).

To manage the hosts oVirt wants to have some oVirt bits running on them. 
  Porting them to Debian should be possible.  But as the stuff interacts 
with the distro bootup scripts it is most likely noticable more work 
than just compile+install.

cheers,
   Gerd