Concepts

Complete separation of "hardware" (physical servers and virtual machines) from "software" (server-images)

With openQRM, hardware is merely used as "computing resource" which can be replaced easily without the need to adapt or reconfigure the server (-image) at all.

Support for different virtualization technologies

openQRM supports and seamlessly manages VMware, Xen, KVM and Citrix XenServer virtual machines. openQRM supports P2V (physical to virtual), V2P (virtual to physical) AND V2V (virtual to virtual) migration. This not only means server appliances can move from physical to virtual systems (and back) easily but also that they can be migrated from virtualization technology A to virtualization technology B without any hassle.

Fully automatic Nagios configuration (single click) to monitor all systems and services

Nagios is known to be a great system and service monitoring tool...but it's quite difficult and time-consuming to configure. In openQRM we just developed a completely automatic configuration of Nagios via "nmap2nagios-ng" which maps the entire openQRM network and creates (or updates) the Nagios config for it (all systems, all available services).

Deployed some new servers? With a single mouse click you will have them in the Nagios monitor.

Ready-made server-images via the image-shelf plugin

To get started quickly and easily openQRM provides ready-made and known-to-work server-images for Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS. Therefore we added an image-shelf plugin which allows the system administrator to fetch server-images easily via the web-interface. Public or custom image-shelf servers can be used, meaning you can either fetch server-images from our public image-shelf server or provide your own image-shelf server with custom images.

Integrated storage management

We asked ourself "what is linux?". It is the kernel, an initrd, some modules and a root-filesystem. Those are all "just" files...so we should treat them like files by putting and managing them on modern storage-servers. Then we can also benefit from logical volume management (e.g. LVM2, NetApp flexiclone, etc.) to ultra fast clone existing server-images via snapshotting. So in case you want to deploy 10 new servers, openQRM will create 10 snapshots of an existing, known-to-work server-image and deploy those clones to the resources. It only takes a second!

Another benefit of this concept is that there is a single place for backup/restore, right there where it should be - on the storage-server itself so you can use its cloning/snapshot features again to create hot-backups from your servers without service interruption.

openQRM supports the following storage-server types:

  • NFS (NAS)
  • iSCSI (SAN)
  • Aoe/Coraid (AOE SAN)
  • NetApp (iSCSI SAN)
  • Local-disk (transferring server-images to the local disk)
  • LVM-Nfs (NFS on top of LVM2 to allow fast-cloning)
  • LVM-iSCSI (iSCSI on top of LVM2 to allow fast-cloning)
  • LVM-Aoe (Aoe on top of LVM2 to allow fast-cloning)
  • Equallogic (iSCSI SAN)
  • ZFS (iSCSI SAN)

Find the right edition

openQRM is available in two editions.

openQRM Community Edition is a fully open-source project licensed under the GPLv2, hosted on sourceforge.net. It is freely usable for any personal or commercial purpose, but doesn't come with the extended features and support of the openQRM Enterprise Edition. Learn more in the Community section.

openQRM Enterprise Edition is the commercially backed product for professional users. If you are building professional datacenter platforms using openQRM and if you need reliable support options or access to the "latest and greatest" additional features, you might want to consider taking a look at the openQRM Enterprise Edition.

Screenshots

High-Availability: "N to 1" fail-over!

Usually, if you need to run e.g. 10 custom servers in a high-availability setup, you normally would need another 10 custom stand-by systems. With openQRM you can make them all use just 1 (or more) stand-by system(s), saving you 9 servers idling around --> perfect for Green IT!

...and there is more fun with HA: You can save just ALL your stand-by servers and simply bring up a virtual-machine as stand-by. In case of problems, HA-appliances will then fail-over from physical to virtual. You can also fail-over from virtualization technology A to technology B (e.g. from KVM to VMware VM's).

Support for all kinds of different deployment types

Deployment in openQRM is completely transparent and plug-able. In detail this means we made the step of "mounting the rootfs" plug-able so you can basically boot-up from any storage-device you want by adding a small plugin for it, e.g. one could write a "gmailfs-storage" plugin which takes care of mounting a server's root-filessystem via gmailfs, just because it can be done. Another advantage of openQRM is that it then can transform server-images from type A to type B, e.g. you can deploy an appliance which will get a pre-defined server-image from an nfs-server and dumps this to its local disk, then it will just continue boot-up from its local disk. You can also grab an image from a local disk and e.g. transfer it to an Iscsi-Lun and so on....since the deployment is so generic in openQRM 4.x we basically support any combination of image transfer and transformation. If it is a root filesystem, we can boot it - either on real hardware or within some virtual machine, it's up to you.

Distribution support

openQRM comes with a solid support for different linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS. A single openQRM server can manage the provisioning of servers from those different linux distributions seamlessly.

... and some more

There are some more cool features in openQRM, e.g. it's small, it's easy to install, it is very developer-friendly, it's fast to build, it has an integrated packaging system to build rpms and/or deb packages, support for multiple database types, e.g. MySQL, Oracle, DB2 and Postgres...and so on.

We are working on improving it all the time.