Private Cloud Stack without hardware virtualization

Question

I want to set up a private Cloud for testing purposes, the problem is, I don't have the newest Hardware for this plan. Especially the most of my machines don't have hardware virtualization support. I tried the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, but the instances stuck in the "pending" state. The hypervisor used kvm and then it crashed. And heard that Xen isn't as good implemented in the UEC to use it.

My question now is, which would be the best cloud stack for me? A stack which can handle not hardware virtualized machines better.

I only wan't to use it for testing, EC2 is to expensive for me at this time for my current development state.

Answer 1

Eucalyptus supports the hypervisor preferred by the specific distro. UEC prefer KVM, so you will need hardware virtualizaion, but CentOS (for example) prefers XEN so you could install Eucalyptus and use it without the need of hardware supported virtualisation. Last time I check Debian supported both kvm and xen, but it may requires you some configuration.

Answer 2

I think OpenStack with qemu as your hypervisor should work since qemu does full hardware virtualization rather than using the CPU's layer.

I've been able to run OpenStack inside of VirtualBox via this guide with no problems: http://uksysadmin.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/running-openstack-under-virtualbox-a-complete-guide/

Answer 3

You don't say exactly what hardware you have or what kind of web stack you want to run, so this might not apply to you, but if you're building Perl/Python/Node/Ruby apps and have a 64bit OS and a 64bit CPU you could try Stackato micro-cloud.

I can run the Stackato VM in VMWare Fusion on my three year old macbook without issue.

Answer 4

Check out devstack.org It's a pretty painless way to test openstack inside of a virtualization environment of your choice... or on the system itself.

Answer 5

Remember that those virtualization platforms that provide you with full-virtulized solutions (i.e. vmware) usually are depended on hardware support to this aim. If your hardware does not support VT, use those platforms that are based on para-virtualization, e.g. Xen-based ones. Take a look at the following solutions. They may be helpful

• OpenNebula
• XenoServer
• Eucalyptus (Free trial is available)