I am looking at turning my old Dell 2650 and 2950 servers into Vmware vSphere Servers, however vSphere is very very expensive.
Is there an open source alternative that provides the same performance as vSphere in a Ubuntu or Debian distro? I dont actually mean "Virtual box" or "Vmware player" but rather a server hypervisor that is easy to set up and host virtual machines on my network?
The Best Solution is http://www.proxmox.com/, It has pretty good web interface.
"Liberate your servers and move to an Open Virtualization Platform - Go Open Source!"
You can implement OpenStack over Debian or vSphere.
Reference Blogs
Check out this article on LinkedIn about using OpenStack as a VMware alternative. Especially if you are looking for private cloud features like self-services and automated provisioning.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vmware-a ... k-articles
Best of all you can run your OpenStack on Ubuntu without a hitch - it is Linux agnostic.
Intel recently migrated 17,000 virtual machines from VMware to OpenStack and reduced provisioning time from 90 days to 30 minutes while saving over $21 million in licensing (and counting). Download the white paper written by Intel engineers at
Red Hat's Virtualization platform: https://www.ovirt.org/ (open source upstream) https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/virtualization
You can try http://www.xen.org or http://www.linux-kvm.org Both are open source.
If you're looking for a turnkey'ish solution Ubuntu Autopilot, it uses MAAS and depoys openstack.
