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I'm looking for virtualization solution to implement the following scenario:

  1. Creating Virtual Machine (VM) + Installing guest OS (Windows/Linux), applications, DB etc.
  2. Creating image of VM (including all things installed on it) and possibly compressing this image to reduce storage space consumption (assumed creating of repository contains images of VMs).
  3. Fast managing of VM images including fast deployment, cloning etc.

So, my question is:

What is virtualization software meeting my requirements (I mean VMWare ESXi, Xen, KVM etc.)? May be it's a bundle of software (solution)?

I tried a VMWare ESXi but it doesn't have any tools to create/manage images.

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ESXi definitely has this functionality built in, it's just only accessible through vCenter. It sounds like you're only considering free products for this project. What's your budget? –  jgoldschrafe Nov 9 '10 at 13:34
Yeah. Both major bvendors have what is asked for - VmWare and Microsoft. Just not in the free versions. –  TomTom Nov 9 '10 at 13:47
Microsoft has teh large advntage it can work with all knids of technologies (SCVMM is the product you look for), not only it's own. –  TomTom Nov 9 '10 at 13:47
jgoldschrafe, Could you please guide me where to find images management functionality in ESXi? –  NetBear Nov 9 '10 at 13:54
vCenter, SCVMM. ESX itself has no management functionality like that. It is not the responsibility of a hypervisor to be a management interface. This is an additional product. –  TomTom Nov 9 '10 at 14:45
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2 Answers

Check Out ProxMox.

It is openVZ as well as KVM.

Their forums are a great place for support - and while opensource - they do also provide paid support should you require it.

We love Proxmox ( www.proxmox.com - look for the VPE link on that page) and have a large number of VPS' running on that platform.

We also love VMWare - however for the cost / budget strapped folks - ProxMox is nice. There are ways to take VMWare images and convert to KVM as well - with a little work

So - you can use a ton of the vmware images out there if needed.

One really nice addition to ProxMox is the ability to utilize DRDB - and shared storage when utilizing the KVM product...


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Check out Bluelock. They offer a service using something called Cloud Director(VMWare's new product). This allows you to do a lot of stuff that you need, and if you can't the support team will help you figure it out.

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Thank you David for assistance but vCloud Director is the solution for corporate cloud infrastructure, not for standalone virtualized server. –  NetBear Nov 9 '10 at 15:06
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