Opening the clouds: qualitative overview of the state-of-the-art open source VM-based cloud management platforms

The last year has seen the release of several open-source software leveraging recent advances in virtualization technology. These software provide the ability to build clusters of hardware resources to host and manage several virtual machines. While the underlying hypervisors are common to all of them, the logical architecture and feature implementation tend to be different on each platform, making one or the other more appropriate for particular use cases. In this paper, we describe our experience using four of the most advanced platforms (ECP, Eucalyptus, OpenNebula and oVirt), and provide some feedback about our experience, ease of use, and targeted utilization of each one. Our goal here is to provide the reader with a comprehensive and quick qualitative overview of the state-of-the-art of these open source cloud management platforms.