In my last post I discussed Proxmox and SmartOS as possible alternatives to ditching vmware ESXi for my homelab.
Given the amount of information that is out there on the internet and that I spent quite a few hours trying to find other open source projects / cloud platforms that could be other alternatives, I thought why not make a post linking to all the platforms I have come across during my search, this way it will help someone else to simply click thru opening new tabs.
List last updated 01/08/2017
The hypervisors (they only support VMs):
- vmware ESXi
- XenServer
- Oracle VM (based off Xen server project above)
- Microsoft Hyper-V
The hybrids (allows VMs and containers at the same time under the same host – no need to spin up VMs for containers)
Obviously you can also run containers on linux without using a bare-metal hypervisor like the options above. All you need to do is install Docker. But how are you going to manage/monitor/deploy your containers? command line is an option but there’s tools out there.
Container orchestration tools
- Cloudslang
- Kubernetes (the 500lb gorilla of orchestration tools)
- Kontena
- Apache CloudStack (this seems to manage only hypervisors and not containers)
- Marathon (for Mesos and DC/OS)
- Portainer
- Shipyard
- Panamax
- Rancher (a complete platform for running containers – highly complex)
Kubernetes addons:
- Cockpit (multi-server web management)
An interesting platform seems to be Mirantis OpenStack – if you are willing to put in the effort and deploy several of its plugins it looks like you would be able to host VMs, containers and have a web front-end to manage them all. Since this is not a single solution and it requires you to deploy several plugins I am leaving this uncategorized for now.
