Ganeti is open source software from Google to manage a cluster of linux hosts running virtual machines using the Xen or KVM hypervisors. Â I was attracted to it because it handled everything from creating new instances to managing network disk mirroring (via DRBD) to help with instance availability. Â It even supports migrating a running instance from one host to another with one short command line. Â Now that I have it working, its possible to have a new Ubuntu vm running in about 5 minutes, probably less if I don’t need disk mirroring.
That’s the good part, the bad part is that it is developed to run Debian instances on Debian hosts with the Xen hypervisor. Â Ok, that’s not the bad part, the bad part is that even though it works with other linux guests and hosts and the with KVM hypervisor, there are a number of hitches and gaps, even when using the Debian-derviced Ubuntu Linux distribution. Â I still need to update an earlier post I made on trying to get it to work on Ubuntu to reflect what I finally did to get things working, but I wanted to share a big piece of the work I did.