openQRM 4.4

openQRM is the next generation, open-source Data-center management platform. Its fully pluggable architecture focuses on automatic, rapid- and appliance-based deployment, monitoring and high-availability and especially on supporting and conforming multiple virtualization technologies. openQRM is a single-management console for the complete IT-infra structure and will provide a well defined API which can be used to easily integrate third-party tools as additional plugins.

Notes:

• For further installation instruction openQRM is licensed and released under the Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL 1.1).

Major Features:

1. Complete separation of "hardware" (physical servers and virtual machines) from "software" (server-images): With openQRM hardware is just used as "computing resource" which can be replaced easily without the need to adapt or reconfigure the server (-image) at all.
2. Support for different virtualization technologies: In 4.1 just added KVM to the supported virtualization technologies so now VMware, Xen, KVM and Linux-VServer vms can be managed transparently via openQRM. openQRM seamlessly support P2V (physical to virtual), V2P (virtual to physical) AND V2V (virtual to virtual) migration. This mean server appliances can not only move from physical to virtual (and back) easily but also that they can be migrated from virtualization technology A to virtualization technology B without any hassle.
3. Fully automatic Nagios configuration (single click) to monitor all systems and services: Nagios is known to be a great system and service monitoring tool .... but it's quite difficult to configure it. In openQRM 4.1 we just developed a completely automatic configuration of Nagios via "nmap2nagios-ng" which maps the entire openQRM-network and creates (or updates) the Nagios config for it (all systems, all available services).
4. High-availability : "N to 1" fail-over:
   • You can have e.g. 10 custom HA-servers which normally would need another 10 custom stand-by systems. With openQRM you can make them all just use 1 (or more) stand-by systems
   • You can just save ALL your stand-by servers and just bring up a virtual-machine as stand-by. In case of problems HA-appliances will then fail-over from physical to virtual. You can also fail-over from virtualization technology A to technology B (e.g. from KVM to VMware vm's)
5. Ready-made-server-images via the image-shelf plugin:
   
   • To get started quick and easy openQRM 4.1 now provides ready-made and known-to-work server-images for Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and openSuse. Therefore an image-shelf plugin was added which allows the systemadministrator to fetch servers easily via the web-interface. Public or custom image-shelf servers can be used, meaning you can either fetch server-images from the public image-shelf server or provide
   • your own image-shelf server with custom images.
6. Integrated storage management:
   • openQRM will create 10 snapshots of an existing, known-to-work server-image and deploy those clones to the resources. Takes a second ...
   • Another benefit of this concept is that there is a single place for backup/restore, there were it should be, on the storage-server itself so you can use its cloning/snap-shot features again to create hot-backups from your servers without service interruption.
   • openQRM 4.1 supports the following storage-server types :
   • • NFS
     • Iscsi
     • Aoe/Coraid
     • NetApp
     • Local-disk (transferring server-images to the local-disk)
     • LVM-Nfs (NFS on top of LVM2 to allow fast-cloning)
     • LVM-Iscsi (Iscsi on top of LVM2 to allow fast-cloning)
     • LVM-Aoe (Aoe on top of LVM2 to allow fast-cloning)
7. Support for all kinds of different deployment types:
   • Deployment in openQRM is completely transparent and plug-able. In detail this means the step of "mounting the rootfs" plug-able was made so you can basically boot-up from any storage-device you want by adding a small plugin for it e.g. one could write a "gmailfs-storage" plugin which takes care to mount a servers root-filessystem via gmailfs, just because it can be done ;)
   • Another advantage of openQRM is that it then can transform server-images from type A to type B e.g. you can deploy an appliance which will get a pre-defined server-image from an nfs-server and dumps this to itsl ocal-disk, then it will just continue boot-up from its local-disk. You can also grab an image from a local disk and e.g. transfer it to an Iscsi-Lun and so on ....
   • Since the deployment is so generic in openQRM 4.x
     
8. Distribution support: openQRM 4.x comes with a solid support for different linux distribution like Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and openSuse. A single openQRM server can manage the provisioning of servers from those different linux distributions seamlessly.
9. There are some more cool features in openQRM 4.x e.g. its small, its easy to install, it is very developer friendly, its fast to build, it has an integrated packaging systems to build rpms and/or deb packages, support for multiple database types e.g. Mysql, Oracle, DB2 and Postgres .... and so on.
   

Enhancements:

• Debian build system updated
• Added nagios3 plugin
• Enhanced nagios2 integration, providing new automap option
• Implemented [ 2474672 ] persistant appliances for the cloud
• Fixed [ 2509597 ] requesting multiple resource does not free up cloud-ips
• Fixed [ 2520734 ] in openqrm 4.3 xen plugin theres a typo
• Fixed [ 2529860 ] umounting of /lib/modules before init
• Fixed [ 2524342 ] xen plugin does not find xen.gz in redhat based installs
• Fixed [ 2524370 ] xen plugin: xm/new.py requires xen 3.1+
• Implemented [ 2513579 ] integration of the Puppet groups into the Cloud
• Fixed [ openqrm-Bugs-2544987 ] xen plugin xm list avoiding dom0 entry
• Fixed [ openqrm-Bugs-2509728 ] growing event_info table slows down base engine
• Implemented [ openqrm-Feature Requests-2542613 ] xen-plugin make the location of the cfg files configurable
• Implemented [ openqrm-Feature Requests-1875784 ] enhancing the LinuxCOE integration
• Made the command-execution layer plug-able
• Added new command-execution layer based on dropbear (ssl + shared keys)
• Implemented [ openqrm-Feature Requests-2468844 ] cloud: on/off switch for the cloud -> being able to take it offline
• Puppet + webmin
• Added per-User Cloud-resource limits (quantity, memory, disk, network, cpus)
• Enhanced sshterm plugin, implemented secure remote access via ajaxterm and pound reverse-ssl-proxy
• Integrated sshterm-plugin into the Cloud
• Implemented [ openqrm-Feature Requests-1881578 ] ng: automatic loadbalancing for Xen vms
• Implemented [ openqrm-Feature Requests-1921180 ] ng: need a way to execute commands on the managed resources
• Implemented [ openqrm-Feature Requests-2502207 ] Web service plugin.

Requirements:

• 1 GHz processor
• 512 Megabytes RAM
• 2 GB free hard disk space