Ganeti Review - why 3.6 stars?

Shlomi Lavi / updated: Sep 11, 2019

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What is Ganeti?

Ganeti is an open-source virtualization management software for small and growing businesses that can help users to manage storage, networks and virtual machines. The software is built on top of popular virtualization technologies like KVM, Xen and other open source solutions.

Google, the company behind Ganeti, was founded back in 1998, is headquartered in Mountain View, California and has thousands of employees and offices all around the world.

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Who is it best for?

Ganeti is suitable for small and midsize businesses, universities and non-profit organizations that are looking for a virtualization management software to build a private cloud. The software can be used as a single-host management solution and also as large-scale computing software by users.

Main features and functionalities

Ganeti comes with support for Xen virtualization with features like: PVM and HVM instances support, live migration support, virtual console or VNC for controlling instances and virtio or emulated devices support. The support for KVM virtualization comes with live migration support, support for fully virtualized and semi-virtualized instances, VNC or serial access support and emulated devices or virtio support. Other notable features are: disk management with files, plain LVM volumes and across the network RAID1 support, instance disk partitioning and import/export mechanism.

What is the actual cost?

The cost of license starts at $20 per user/month. ITQlick pricing score is 3.4 out of 10 (10 is most expensive). Access ITQlick pricing guide for Ganeti.

Pros

• Ganetiis specifically designed to be used with local and cheap storage
• Ganeti is user-friendly and easy to use for a standard Linux sysadmin
• The virtualization management software can be started with a single node and can be scaled out later

Cons

• Ganetidoesn’t have official vendor support which can be a problem for some users
• Ganeti requires more skills comparing to VMware which can be a problem for some users
• The virtualization management software lacks some features like storage vmotion

How it stacks up?

Access a head to head analysis of Ganeti vs alternative software solutions.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)