Ganeti - Virtual Servers Management Tool from Google | Hacker News Reader

Ganeti - Virtual Servers Management Tool from Google

code.google.com

19 pointsvijaydev11 comments

Please allow me to rant about Google Code for a minute.

1. It's hard to tell which projects are official Google projects and which aren't.

2. The total lack of real names is disturbing to me. e.g. look at http://code.google.com/u/imsnah/ -- it's completely useless.

I would like to think that Google Code really should not call out whether a project is an official Google project. Ideally all open source projects would live and die on their own merits.

1. Official Google projects have the "Google" label. http://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label:Google

Not quite: projects written by Googlers have the 'Google' label, which is unusable by normals.

Official Google products are not hosted as normal 'projects': the URLs are code.google.com/product or code.google.com/apis/product instead of code.google.com/p/project.

I stand corrected.

I've been using this at work to rebuild our internal infrastructure for test, file serving, etc. I was intrigued by its ability to manage disk redundancy via DRDB, though I haven't really tested the instance failover features. So far, I've been focused on getting it working nicely for Ubuntu guests. It's pretty cool to bring up a fresh machine with the latest packages in a few minutes. It'll really come in handy when I start working through configuration management and deployment automation for our apps.

Anyone know what Google uses this for?

Running virtual machines on hardware?

I mean thats pretty much what ganeti provides right?

But Google says they don't use virtualization.

They don't use virtualization for any of their normal infrastructure -- it's much more productive to have locality with GFS/BigTable/memcache/App/etc all running in the same OS image on every machine.

I do see them having plenty of use for virtualization when provisioning machines to run non-infrastructure, their client software, other people's software, etc. Its usefulness for software testing should be obvious.

I don't know if they use full x86 virt. for it, but your App Engine processes have several layers of OS sandboxing around them.

I'm not sure why I think this, but I had them impression that they use it for test environments, but I'm pretty sure they also use it to provide "cloud" desktops for employees, I think I saw reference to it in a presentation about the open source NX server they released a little while ago.

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