This morning I was informed that DynamicOps is going to donate the use of it’s flagship product VRM for use in the free lab. For those of you not familiar with DynmaicOps VRM (Virtual Resource Manager) it is a workflow automation product that boasts amazing flexibility for managing your virutal infrastructure. It will become the core of the lab. It will control user access, facilitate automatic provisioning of machines threw it’s self service web interface, control the duration of time a user can have access to a machines, distribute lab resources, assign lab moderators, allow for an approval process for requested machines, any many other functions based on it very wide set of features and functionality. VRM will also allow us to scale the lab out and make it very distributed by allowing others to host resources that will be made available to the community lab. VRM is so flexible and extensible that there is nothing we won’t be able achieve. I would like to thank the folks at DynamicOps for allowing us the use of this great tool to facilitate the creation and operation of the community lab, this is going to really make it something great.
I would also like to announce that a good friend of mine Tom Bonanno will be assuming the responsibilities of Lead Developer for the project. Even with great tools like VRM their will need to be a considerable amount of custom development to really make this lab a reality. Tom is a very talented programmer with extensive knowledge around PHP, .NET, C#, VB, and other languages. I’m very excited to have him on the project, he will be a great asset. Tom is also going to be given the ability to blog here on Dailyhypervisor so he can share some of his experiences while developing code for lab.
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I have decided to utilize XenServer5 as the Hypervisor for the First Generation of the Community Lab. I have chosen Xen because to the level of support it has for templates in the free version. Without template support the flexibility of the lab would be compromised and it would hold much value. I would have liked to have had initial support for vSphere but I don’t see VMware donating any licenses anytime soon…..
For storage I will be using a 1TB ReadyNas NV. I’m going to try and increase the storage to at least 2TB prior to opening up the lab beta but for now it will be 1TB. i can potentially add another 1TB using USB drives attached to the ReadyNAS but I prefer to only utilize drives that can be configured for RAID. I don’t foresee NetApp donating storage anytime soon so we will have to rely on home brew solutions until we gain some traction. Alliances like OpenFiler and FreeNas on custom built system with loads of storage is the growth plan at this time.
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As I progress through the design of the first generation of the community lab I need to make decisions on an implementation strategy. Not from a hardware and a virtual environment perspective, but form an automation perspective. Currently I’m looking at a number of community scripts and some of my own to provide automation within the environment. The challenge is creating a well oiled machine that will almost run itself with the help of community moderators.
Ideally it will be self service. A user will come and signup, get approval for an account and then be able to login to a portal where they can then request access to resources (vm in gen 1). From there they would get the resources they need but for a pre-defined period of time. I’m thinking 5 days in the gen 1 version of the lab. At the end of the 5 days the machines will be destroyed and the resources given back to the pool so the next request in the queue can be filled.
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We all have come to love many free services that we have integrated into our daily lives. Things like free email, free voice mail, free open source applications, free video streaming, social networking sites, operating systems, and many other services that make our lives better. At dailyhypervisor.com we are working on a new type of free service that can help all of you in the technical community. A free community lab. A free community lab would provide access to an environment that would grant everyone the opportunity to learn IT hands on and provide the ability for those who don’t have the means to test and learn about new technologies.
Tackling something of this scale will not be easy, but with help from the community hopefully we can make this something extraordinary. I personally will be donating some of my own lab equipment to the first generation of this lab environment. I’m currently working on building the lab for early beta testing by the end of March 2010. The first generation of this lab will consist of 3 servers running ESX4i. The servers have limited resources but each one consists of a single Quad-Core AMD Phenom 9850 processor, 8GB of Memory and access to 1TB of NFS storage. Access to the lab in the beginning will be by invite only much like other beta offerings. If you are interested in participating and leveraging this opportunity please register with dailyhypervisor.com and post a comment to this blog post stating your interest in participating. In your post please provide a brief description of how you would leverage this and also anything you would like to see available in the lab. All early beta users will be also to provide feedback on the lab and may be asked to participate as environment moderators once the lab goes GA. Much like community forums the goal is to make this community driven and supported by user moderators and the such.
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Categories: Community Lab, Free Stuff, XenServer, automation, vSphere Tags: Desktop Virtualization, ESX, vCenter, VI4, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
