Okay, so i have a small cluster of older servers, a total of 20, including HP and DELL. I have a daemon running on each server, and have the programs sharing information through a MySQL Server.

And i hear all the hype about "Cloud" from the public AMAZON to private clouds.

My questions:
Is a cloud infrastructure feasible using the Ubuntu MAAS installation?
Can i easily transfer all my current running programs? (That are just running under regular instances of Ubuntu Server)

I question if i really need to visualize everything. But also, i am not quite aware of all the uses of visualization are anyway.

If this is feasible, i may try a small server on a little 2 node HP CL380. My only problem is doing this without disrupting the DHCP stuff that is already implemented around my network.

Is this worth my time to look into and transfer everything to the cloud? let me know, thanks.

(PS, if this belongs in another section, then i am sorry, i posted here because i intend to run a all-ubuntu thing)There are many pros and cons to using a cloud such as Amazon's Public Clouds.

We ended up not going with it for many reasons, but 2 primary reasons was our ISP wasnt the greatest for 100% uptime and local power outages would drop the internet about 60% of the time, meanwhile headquarters of the small food store chain was able to stay running off large UPS's and generator.

We were looking into this to save a lot of money in not having to buy new servers to replace our Compaq Proliant Pentium III servers which were beyond their average life expectancy and were ready to die at any time.

I tested Amazon cloud using MS Server, but haven't tested Linux Server OS. Also a short while after testing there was the news about Amazon's cloud bringing down businesses when if my memory is correct a power grid failed and part of their cloud went down.

Since then I ended up leasing a couple servers through HP which can do the work of about 5 Pentium III's each running Dual Xeons. Less electricity needed and the lease with HP gave us hardware support if anything failed with 24 hr on site service and replacement of failed hardware. The company could not justify buying the hardware outright and the monthly lease payments to HP were very affordable as well as came with extra benefits that are not included when buying hardware outright.
I am curious, though, what exactly would be the advantages of a MAAS system VS a Visualization type cloud, and of course, VS the old way of individual OS on each system.

I would like an easy way to manage the applications on the systems from the WEB interface provided by MAAS, but i have no idea about the webpanel's quality and functionality, because my VirtualBox wont visualize the 12.04 RELEASES for some reason. (says i don't have "pae").

Either way, this is not a huge data center operation, this is more the size of a small cluster, only a couple racks at most. so renting/leasing servers is not within our prospect. We choose ubuntu because of the Open Source, and because of it's ease of use (at least for our applications).

The only other thing is that the cluster is part of a larger network, and because MAAS tries to run it's own DHCP, i dont want to run it on the network quite yet. I believe i will just pull a gateway from a parts bin and create a LAN for some experimentation with a MAAS head and node only.

From my understanding, MAAS has been bashed quite a bit for being "Different" from the regular three cloud types. but i am not quite sure if cloud even is a good idea for our applications.

Thanks. Another option, how i see it, is to use OPENSTACK.

After looking at the page, i read that it needs at least one box with 4 Cores and 8 gigs of ram. I currently have only one system that barely meets those terms. are these actually requited?

I am seeing uses to creating a cloud instead of using individual installations.

I will **try** to virtual machine it on my personal computer and see how it all works. I do already have an account with TryStack.org as well, but i would like to see how this would run, and how to set it up.

My only questions with OpenStack, is: How is the OS handled? I believe this is virtualization, but what would i need to install to make virtualization possible, or rather, what would i install on the nodes?

I am new to the cloud world, but i am not new to running server OS. Please do feel free to guide me through the starting points of cloud.