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Google Ganeti

Forrest Stroud
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:44 am

Ganeti is an open source virtual server management project developed by Google and used internally by the company to facilitate cluster management of virtual servers in commodity hardware.

Google Ganeti is built to function on top of existing virtualization technologies like Xen or KVM. Google developed Ganeti to provide cluster management of virtual servers, facilitating virtualization tasks like disk creation, migration, VM shutdown and startup, failover between physical systems, operating system installation and more.

Origins and Popularity of Google Ganeti

Google launched development of Ganeti in its Zurich office, and in 2007 the company released an initial beta of Ganeti as open source software. Today the software is used by enterprises across the world for virtual server cluster management.

While it doesn’t offer the extensive range of features and capabilities of virtualization management tools like VMware vSphere, Ganeti is touted for being simple to set up and maintain. As a result, Ganeti has become popular particularly with smaller and mid-sized enterprises for managing virtual machines, storage and networks.