openQRM , first experiences :)
With much delay , I finally found some time to write down my first experiences and toughts on openQRM, I've ben working with Matt of Qlusters doing lots of tests for different plugins and features of openQRM. And what can I say.. I love the tool, but I won't be putting it into production yet at a customer yet.
openQRM today expects you to boot a full operational system over the network, while it has some advantages such as being able to boot the same identical image on different hardware with a couple of mouse clicks, I still prefer to deploy
an image physically on a disk, certainly in the customer environments I'm facing today that method is preferred , but within an environment where servers stay at the same location and networkwise fairly close to a central server and when they are not being shipped to the other side of the world openQRM surely is an option :)
Within that filosophy of booting over the network openQRM does a great job giving people a nice webconsole from where they can mange and deploy new nodes and with their nice plugin system tools such as webmin and Nagios are easily integrated in one management frontend. (Did I mention you don't need to use the web frontend, you can use command line interfaces also.. )
Now the really good news is that I`m not alone with my request for deploying images rather than booting images, and that I've already been discussing with the openQRM team at LinuxTag on how I would do such a thing.
openQRM gives a new meaning to the word Virtualisation, it gives you isolation between the hardware and the software platform and because you don't need to be aware where you have deployed a certain resource it doesn't really matter anymore if it is virtual of physical.
I`m about to take a closer look at how partitioning works in openQRM... I`ll be back with more toughts about it :)