[one-users] Tiny Local Business scenario for openNebula

[Ben Tullis]

Hi Diego,

I don't think that OpenNebula is likely to be the best tool for the job
in this case, as it is more geared towards on-demand cloud computing.

However, it does sound like you could really benefit from virtualization
in the office. The way I would approach your situation is as follows.

Make sure that the machine you're going to use as a server has hardware
virtualization support built in.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_VT#Processor

Use disks in pairs of equal sizes, then install Linux and configure
software RAID1 so that the system will be able to withstand a failure in
any disk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mdadm

Install a hypervisor to enable you to run many concurrent virtual
machines. You might like to consider KVM, Xen and Virtualbox.
http://www.linux-kvm.org
http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/
http://virtualbox.org

You can then define virtual machines and install Windows onto them, in
order to make them available to your colleagues. You can use normal
Windows system management techniques (such as sysprep) to deploy
pre-configured Windows system images, thereby saving you time. You could
then use VNC to make these virtual machines available to your staff, in
the manner that you suggest.

I'm currently looking at building an OpenNebula cluster to support a
small-business requirement, but I can't really see that there is any way
of ensuring high-availability in any system with fewer than four
physical servers in it. I think you'd be making things unnecessarily
hard for yourself if you tried to do it all on one server.

I hope that helps.

Kind regards,
Ben

-- 
|Ben Tullis
|Tiger Computing Ltd
|"Linux for Business"
|
|Tel: 033 0088 1511
|Web: http://www.tiger-computing.co.uk
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