Now that the hardware has been decided upon and ordered, it’s time to decide on OS & management tools.
My current box runs Ubuntu, and I use virt-manager to create & manage the VM’s. The obvious disadvantage of virt-manager is that it’s an GUI application which runs on the server itself. To access it I either need to plug a mouse & keyboard into the host, or use some type of remote administration software (I currently use NoMachine) to access the GUI.
I want something better on the new box, so one of my requirements is that I can manage the VM’s via a web interface. My options are legion (in alphabetical order):
While some of these are merely lightweight shells on top of KVM/libvirt, others are extensive, modular frameworks intended to be deployed on many-server setups.
Because all I need is something small & light, OpenNebula, CloudStack & OpenStack are not for me. Eucalyptus & OpenNode are ‘maybe’s’ for the moment.
That leaves WebVirtMgr & Kimchi, both of which are pretty lightweight.
I’ve decided to go for WebVirtMgr initially. It works pretty good, although it’s clearly a work in progress.
Now that I don’t need any GUI on the box itself, I’ll settle for Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS (Trusty Tahr) as OS.
[more to come]
WebVirtMgr has served me well for almost 2 years, but about a month ago I’ve decided to switch to Proxmox.