FOSDEM '08 is a free and non-commercial event organised by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet.

   

Interview: Matthias Rechenburg

Sat, 2008-02-02 10:38

Visit FOSDEM 2008 and Matthias Rechenburg's talk in particular to learn more about openQRM.

What's your personal goal for your FOSDEM presentation?

My goal is to show how openQRM can help the IT-department to manage their data-center especially when it comes to "mixed" environments with physical and virtual systems. Since the openQRM platform is implemented with a pluggable architecture I would also like to encourage developers and system administrators to write new, custom plugins and to see how easy it is to integrate third-party tools within openQRM.

What is the link between QLusters and openQRM?

Qlusters is the sponsor and support company behind the open-source project openQRM.

And you are able to work full-time on openQRM?

Yes indeed...

What kind of functionality can openQRM automate for such virtual systems?

openQRM can automate the provisioning, deployment, administration, monitoring, migration and high-availability for virtual machines in the same way as for physical systems. Via an generic partition-layer it conforms different virtualization technologies and supports appliance-based, rapid deployment including fast-cloning of servers using modern storage technologies.

So openQRM is actually used a lot in combination with virtual systems?

Yes it is, especially with Xen-based systems.

What are the advantages of being Open Source in the systems management software market?

The advantages for openQRM being open-source is that it raises the acceptance and the number of potential users. We are trying to fill the gap for a complete IT infrastructure framework which let system administrators manage their data center using a single-management console.
Of course it also helps to agree to certain data-center standards using the feedback from the community.

Do you feel that openQRM still lacks some features?

Next to VMware, Xen, QEMU and Linux-VServer we (the openQRM-Team) would like to add support for more virtualization technologies like Virtualbox, openVZ and Virtuoso.
This is definitely on the roadmap for the future versions.

Are you still involved in OpenMosix as well?

Yes, but since the openMosix project stopped its active developement there is currently not very much to be involved with until someone picks it up again :-)