Quote:
Originally Posted by thund3rstruck
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The Linux Counter used to remove stagnant accounts. The reasoning behind this was that people may switch operating systems, and so there were periodic emails sent out to confirm that you were still a Linux user and if there was no response after a few years your counter number was deactivated.
The aim to count users, and if someone was no longer a user then their registration was retired (Mathematically, it's best not to count things that are no longer relevant).
And these counters aren't a dime a dozen. At least there are very few that anyone pays attention to, The Linux Counter Project being the first and most recognized.
ewbuntoo has one, designed to count ewbuntoo users - but even that one states that it is like a mini version of "The Linux Counter", and defers to it.
There's also that dudalibre thing, but I've never been able to figure out what that's all about.
Many of the major distros encourage their users to register with The Linux Counter too. SuSE certainly does, Slackware too, and others - but to be accurate I hesitate to guess which others.
I had a counter number when the counter first came out almost twenty years ago, but it got retired because I switched email addresses and therefore didn't respond to checks to see if I was still active, and so I had to pick up another number by registering myself again.
Otherwise, I would still have a four digit counter number.
You may want to check into why your registration was cancelled, but at this time, there is no active registration for the counter number you are posting.
You may need to register to get a new number too if you want to have a valid counter number again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thund3rstruck
I do apologize if my response was not helpful. Its true that your question was posed in the virtualization forum but its so specifically targeted (particularly towards a specific vendor) that it just makes a lot more sense to ask this question at the vendor source where the answer you receive will be irrefutibly legitimate and accurate.
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Well, actually, I only posted part of what my question is about. The VMware part, and as such a VMware vendor specific solution won't meet my needs anyway - I need to support Xen, KVM, and VMware.
I did take your advice, however, and the forums there, as usual, were not completely helpful, so I contacted my rep and he assured me that he had the solution for me. All I had to do was spend another several thousand dollars with my aggregator who would deliver a solution which wouldn't work - Vcloud.
We even set up a demo trial which I ran for a couple of days while my aggregator tried to convince me to buy it even though it doesn't do what I've asked for.
That's VMware for you. A lot like the mentality over at EllisonCo.
So I'm very happy coming here to LQ first, and depending upon the feedback I get here over many vendor specific forums - which will not talk about solutions not published by those firms.
As a server management platform, I suppose Vcloud would be fine if I was interested in firing up cloud instances and letting the customers slice up their resources any way they wanted to, but that's not what I'm after.
For those following this thread here are some solutions that will work, do in fact work, and I'm now sandboxing some of them.
Remember, my requirements are for a solution that supports virtual server deployment (not just cloud instance deployment) with VMware.
As it turns out, my options weren't as dismally limited as I first thought
For account billing management for self-manged deployment services, there are really only two (That I have identified as viable for my purposes) that work with server management products which support ESXi 5.0. They are:
Both are excellent products. WHMCS is about 425.00/yr USD and a little less than 50.00/yr thereafter, while Ubersmith DE is 699.00/mo USD.
Both of these Interface with the following Server Management products that are excellent too:
In my environment, OnApp would run about three thousand dollars a month, since they charge by the core.
CloudStack and OpenQRM are free, for the most part, since there are plugins which make things really nice that one might want to purchase.
@Thunderstruck: That's why I come to LQ, even for Vendor specific issues, since I can usually get great advice and pointed towards effective solutions. That's something I didn't get on the VMware forums, and it got worse and worse until my aggregator started pushing to close me on a solution that wouldn't meet my needs.
I consider that sort of treatment
neither legitimate, nor accurate, as I have documented here in excruciating detail.
There's also a
StackOps distro - which is kinda like
OpenStack in a box LOL, that one can play with, and
OpenQRM can even be implemented entirely in a virtual environment to sandbox its capabilities and develop a proof of concept (Which I'm playing with now).
CloudStack, a Citrix effort, is a lot like OpenStack and has pledged to closely develop alongside of it. I'm testing this too along with OpenQRM, but on bare metal as opposed to a virtual environment (for the most part).
There's a somewhat exhaustive list of management projects
HERE too, for the adventurous
One might ask, "Why would I want to pay 700 bucks a month when I can pay about half that for the first year with WHMCS?". The answer, to me, might be that you get a lot of datacenter hard metal device monitoring, and part of the virtual machine monitoring can be integrated into your billing management system.
That's where Ubersmith really shines. And this becomes even more significant when you want to cap bandwidth and charge for overages with your VPS customers.
"But I can just install monitoring software for my metrics!", One might say.
Yes, you can install various monitoring applications along the lines of what the
CactiEZ distro gives you in one big bundle, yet you still have the nightmare of applying all of that accounting by hand where your client billing is concerned.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kbp
I've actually been building one myself, still a way to go but its definitely a great learning experience.
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We're doing something similar for our new Xen clouds, but I'm very interested in following what you've got going so if you could keep me posted via this thread, or offlist if you prefer, that would be great
Okay then! To recap real quick. I've identified a few combinations of products that will support the self-managed deployment, management, billing, and ticketing systems for ESXi 5.0 cloud based offerings (and here's the other part that I didn't mention in my opening post), as well as Xen, and KVM.
Had I not been able to find a single seamless bundle, I could have deployed different server management systems to handle the three various virtualization technologies under a single billing system - but fortunately, I'm not actually going to have settle for that.
I hope this thread will be of benefit to others who have similar questions on the interoperability and management of virtualization services. I've endeavored to be somewhat complete as to my research so far to date, and although I'm now marking this thread as solved, please feel free to contribute your thoughts and suggestions, as this topic is a moving target and I'm sure there's much more to contribute to this discussion.
I hope that helps
Kindest regards,
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VMware management software
This is LQ's Virtualization forum. The topical description for this forum is:
Here are my findings so far which lead to viable solutions
