Ganeti is open source software from Google to manage a cluster of linux hosts running virtual machines using the Xen or KVM hypervisors. 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. It even supports migrating a running instance from one host to another with one short command line. 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. 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. 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.