Virge - high level goals

There has been a lot of changes to my life recently, however there is one thing still in my mind. And it has been there for a while, but I never got any time to sit down, write a summary and start doing that. I use the blog mainly to create my opinion on various topics so I've decided to brainstorm it here.

With my friend we like technology, free technology. I always get quite quickly excited about what is possible to achieve with it. Gentoo, Ubuntu, GNOME, Apache foundation just to name a few. And I like to play with that. For a year or two we've been playing with gentoo Linux and Xen and we had a great time. Now there is one physical box running dozen of virtual boxes separated into various network silos, backuped, each with different functionality, monitored and there are several scripts that makes deployment of new machines quite easy. I take it as a proof of concept.

Idea is to have a Linux box where one can deploy virtual appliances with ease in a secure environment with advanced features for network, file systems, software packages and easy to use admin console. We would like to use Gentoo as (despite its recent problems) it is one of most advanced distributions of Linux out there, EVMS (for reliable data storage with possibility to do cluster EVMS), XEN to power virtualization and possibly www console for managing the machines, machines should use binary packages for quick setup. Usage? Home appliances, ISP machines, Datacenter in just one box. I short: the ultimate linux machine ;).

I'm aware of others doing the same (rPath,Redhat,VMware), but as I said, I like the technology so this is our try. Virge is simply Virtualized Gentoo.

Steps:

• create LiveUSB with latest Gentoo2007.0 (updated), that would install Virge on the new box (including the Xen enabled kernel, EVMS setup, some appliances)
• create admin console using Django+Python+libvirt for managing boxes
• merge this application into portage

During the POF we've ran into some issues with portage, for example we are aware that it is not easy to do binary packages with different USE flags (gentoo feature). But I'll leave those to be solved during the FUN.

Any help is welcomed of course.