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openQRM at Devopsdays 09
The openQRM Team is happy to announce its contribution to Devopsdays (http://www.devopsdays.org/) at the 30. + 31. October 2009 in Ghent. This conference has an interesting focus on agile system administration where developers and sysadmins are using similar or the same API's to automate deployment and virtual machine management.
The openQRM presentation at Devopsdays with the topic "A private openQRM Cloud use-case for a developer team" is scheduled for Saturday, the 31. October at 11:30–12:30. It will be held by Matt Rechenburg and deals with how to archive a agile, flexible and automated IT environment based on an example implementation of a private openQRM Cloud for a developer team. Also it will point out important Cloud features to speed up custom provisioning and automate configuration management.
2009-09-18 17:24:14 UTC by mattr_sf
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New ZFS-Storage support in openQRM
The openQRM Team is happy to announce the collaboration with TakeOffTechnology (http://www.takeofftechnology.com)
Running complete server-systems directly from robust, high-available and performant storage server is one of the main concepts of the openQRM Cloud Computing and Data-Center Management platform. With its unique architecture and data-center abstraction layer openQRM provides a complete separation between software- and hardware stack to make physical hardware replaceable at any time.
Especially for Cloud Computing the storage capabilities are an important factor to ensure reliability and service level agreements. To assure best possible quality for their clients by choosing the "latest and greatest" technology available, TakeOffTechnology cooperates with the openQRM Team at the development of a ZFS-Storage integration.
TakeOffTechnology enables businesses of all sizes, developers, consultants, and communities to simplify their complex hosted computing environments. It effectively streamlines deployments, provides complex disaster recovery scenarios, and manages high availability resources. TakeOffTechnology customers enjoy more efficient and effective management of their internet/information infrastructure, while gaining an edge over their competition.
TakeOffTechnology sponsors two new fantastic features in the openQRM. First, the support for Solaris/openSolaris as managed resources and second the integration of the Solaris/openSolaris ZFS filesystem as additional storage option for server-images in openQRM. Via a new "zfs-storage" plugin physical systems or virtual machines from different types are now rapidly deployed and running direct from the ZFS-storage server through the iSCSI protocol.
The ZFS filesystem is still a young project but with amazing features like support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking, automatic repair and RAID-Z it quickly became a new powerful option in latest storage technologies.
Big thanks to TakeOffTechnology for the support and in particular for making those new features available as open-source components (GPL). Both new plugins ("solx86" and "zfs-storage") are available in the files section on the openQRM project website on sf.net.
The openQRM team enjoys and appreciates the excellent cooperation !
Matt Rechenburg
Project Manager openQRM - on behalf of the openQRM Team
2009-07-18 14:54:18 UTC by mattr_sf
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openQRM Cloud 4.5 released
With the new 4.5 version of the openQRM Data-Center Management and Cloud Computing platform the openQRM team archived another milestone for the project. Next to lots of new features the most visible updates are the new Data-Center Summary start page, a "Visual Cloud Designer" (VCD) and the re-worked UI for all plugins in openQRM. Here a screenshot of the new Data-Center Summary display :
-> http://www.openqrm.com/userfiles/openqrm-dc-summary.png
The new start page gives a lot of useful informations like the load of the complete Data-Center and the consumption of each subsystem plus peaks and trends. Very helful for performance tuning and finding bottle-necks.
Another eye-catcher in openQRM 4.5 is of course the "Visual Cloud Designer". It provides a user friendly drag-and-drop UI to request new systems from the openQRM Cloud by selecting the individual components like VM-type, CPU and Netwwork-card count, server-templates, SLA's, HA, etc. and visually constructing them to a new Cloud system. It feels like the "shopping basket for system-administrator", just pick what you need.
Please find more details about how the openQRM VCD works and looks in our teaser video "Cloud Computing in 5 minutes". -> http://www.openqrm.com/?q=node/150
Some more highlights of openQRM 4.5 :
A new plugin now integrates with Dell Equallogic Storage to support direct deployment of physical systems or virtual machines from the Equallogic Iscsi Target and to take advantage of its ultra fast SAS disk array.
Next to Nagios2 and Nagios3 Zabbix is now the third system- and service-monitoring option available in openQRM 4.5.
With the "Cloud NAT" feature one can hide an openQRM Cloud within a private subnet via network-address-translation (NAT). It enables to run the openQRM Cloud independent from the hosting-providers setup.
The automated billing system in the openQRM Cloud was made plug-able and now supports custom calculations including external data-sources.
An updated NetApp-plugin connects NetApp Storages with openQRM and provides an automated storage management for using NetApp Filers as Cloud-Storage (tested with ONTAP 7.0).
The Citrix XenServer plugin got re-implemented and is now the 6. virtualization technology supported by openQRM (tested with Citrix XenServer 5.5.0).
With its unique and generic Data-Center abstration layer openQRM is one of the very few solutions which seamlessly supports multiple virtualization technologies (Xen, KVM, Citrix XenServer, VMware Server 1 + 2, VMware ESX) plus physical systems. When it comes to fully dynamic and automated provisioning including P2V ("physical to virtual"), V2P ("virtual to physical") and also V2V ("virtual type A to virtual type B") migration you should definitely take a look at openQRM.
The full changelog is available at http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=693281&group_id=153504
The openQRM Team also provides a free Demo of the openQRM Cloud at : http://www.openqrm.com/?q=node/150
Please download the new 4.5 version of openQRM at Sourceforge.net
( https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=153504&package_id=328920 )
and find additional informations and more details : http://www.openqrm.com/
2009-06-30 12:58:44 UTC by mattr_sf
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Please nominate openQRM !
The openQRM Team would like to ask you for 20 seconds of your time to nominate openQRM for the SourceForge Community Choice Awards Nominations in the category "Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins".
Here a direct link to the nomination :
http://sourceforge.net/community/cca09/nominate/?project_name=openQRM&project_url=https://sourceforge.net/projects/openqrm/
We have also put up a banner and link on our main website at http://www.openqrm.com
Many thanks for your help making this project even more successful !
greetz + stay tuned,
Matt Rechenburg
on behalf of the openQRM Team
2009-05-14 12:19:49 UTC by mattr_sf
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Video: Cloud Computing in 5 minutes
We made a video which explains how Cloud Computing with openQRM can save you time and money. Please find it at : http://www.openqrm.com/?q=node/150 Get a free test-drive on the openQRM public Demo Cloud at https://demo.openqrm.com
2009-04-20 21:07:26 UTC by mattr_sf
