[ale] which distribution for KVM and OpenECP

[David Hillman]

One of our administrators left and I suddenly found myself with the task of
managing a small network with 5 Dell PowerEdge 2970 servers and a pretty
fast independent connection to the Internet.  This LAN is used by one of our
offices to host some Joomla, ASP.NET apps and a Perl-based CRM application
(non-critical stuff).  There are 2 servers for production and 2 for testing;
the other server is the newest and is unused.  The thing is the newest
server has dual quad core AMD chips, 8 gigs of RAM and 5 fast SAS drives on
RAID.  That box would be highly underutilized for Web apps.  The public side
of the network has 10 IP addresses.  Some of the IP addresses have been
allocated willy nilly to various apps.  Recently, one of the developers
asked me for an IP and some space on one of the servers to demo/test a PHP
app and I had to struggle to do that neatly.  I have to clean up this mess.

My plan is to install a good distribution, like CentOS or Debian, to act as
the host for a private cloud.  That server will have mail, DNS, Apache and
it'll be running KVM.  I have been experimenting with OpenECP to act as a
Web-based control panel for the hypervisor.  Basically, developers can log
in, start up a virtual environment from a list of ready-made environments
and be given random subdomains off of our main domain name (like Amazon
EC2).  I'll also have to allocate some public IPs just for that box.  That
way, they can do whatever they want without bringing down our testing box
and without bugging me all the time (need time to learn Android
development).  The cloud environment will be on the newest box.  Will I need
a spare?  How do I set that up?  So many unanswered questions.  I could use
Amazon EC2 or Rackspace, but that's another headache there.  I would rather
use our hardware.

Anybody familiar with KVM?  What's the easiest distribution to get something
like this rolling?  I am still now sure how to approach the scripting.
 OpenECP uses Python, but it was a pain in the ass to get running when I
tested in on a spare Ubuntu Server 10.1 box.  I read in issue 89 of Linux
User & Developer about using Ruby for this sort of scripting.  How is that?
 It's a long post, but I really have been trying to think hard about this.
 Oh, there is no money to spend on this right now.
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