On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Brandon Kim <brandon.kim@brandontek.com> wrote:
I'm not looking for companies that offer this service, but the actual software engines that allow you to create VM's on the fly. So a customer goes to your website and says I want Win2008 with 8gigs of RAM and 120gigs of HDD. Just like custom configuring a new PC.
How about I send you some terms to search for, using your favorite search engine... Multi-Tenant Hosting > Cloud Computing > IaaS / HaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) > Self-Service Provisioning Because the question is so vague, I think you need more research. If you read the documentation of portal software, you should be able to tell to what extent it would be "turn key" Before looking too closely at any offering... some things to think about are.. How would you go about handling virtual networks and access to them? Will you want one shared network (with requisite Layer 2 security minefield), or will your portal of choice somehow decide to permission and make certain LANs available to certain users' VMs? There will be security and performance considerations that some portal software programs allow you to answer, and some do not. So you need to decide the hard requirements for security, management flexibility, UI attractiveness/ease of use, functionality for the end user, resource management, and price :) Different portals have different options, so define requirements first. A Multi-Tenant IaaS environment (meaning different users sharing pieces of metal, storage, etc) brings in some complexity. Think about how will the resources be balanced? E.g. Will you have a portal place workloads on its own, or rely on some outside system like vmware DRS. Will the portal implement and enforce resource SLAs for Network latency/loss, limit the number of VMs per NIC or per datastore, Memory, CPU and provide I/O response delay assurances, or will machines be left underutilized / overutilized, because the portal is bad at optimizing placement on physical servers, or bad at avoiding overcommit? For an IaaS provider, underutilization eventually means you are eating more kW·h than necessary, and overutilization could be immediately detrimental. The different major virtualization software vendors each have their own Self-Service Provisioning solutions, and there are some third party programs. Most are for Enterprise internal self-provisioning; Hosting providers might have special requirements like "integrated user signups and billing" and "no license restriction against provisioning for outside users". I would expect these to be more expensive, or include monthly per-user fees. Offhand I recall Virtuozzo [perhaps the oldest?], Enomaly / Enomalism, enStratus, MS Dynamic Datacenter Kits which are a framework, VMware vCloud Express through the VSPP, Citrix XCP, Eucalyptus, as interesting by no means exhaustive. -- -JH