Software Alternatives & Reviews

Ganeti VS Packer

Compare Ganeti VS Packer and see what are their differences

Ganeti logo Ganeti

Ganeti is a cluster management tool built on top of existing virtualization technologies.

Packer logo Packer

Packer is an open-source software for creating identical machine images from a single source configuration.
  • Ganeti Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-14
  • Packer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-15

Ganeti videos

Ganeti Cluster Virtualization Manager — Past, Present and Future

More videos:

  • Review - Ganeti: "how you can use it" + "how we did it"
  • Review - Virtualization with Ganeti - Michele Tartara, Google

Packer videos

No Packer videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ganeti and Packer)
Developer Tools
20 20%
80% 80
DevOps Tools
9 9%
91% 91
Continuous Integration And Delivery
Containers As A Service
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Ganeti and Packer

Ganeti Reviews

Introduction to Top Open Source Virtualization Tools
For Ganeti to work, virtualization software must be pre-installed on the servers. Once installed, it assumes management of the virtual instances; Ganeti handles startup, shutdown, OS installation, migration, disk creation, and can be used to preemptively relocate a VM off a physical machine that is failing. Ganeti can be used for both single-host management, like Xen Tools...

Packer Reviews

Introduction to Top Open Source Virtualization Tools
Packer is notably light, high performing, and operates on every major operating system. It assembles and configures all the necessary components for a virtual machine then creates images that run on multiple platforms. Packer doesn’t replace configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef; as a matter of fact, when creating images, Packer can utilize tools like Puppet or...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Ganeti should be more popular than Packer. It has been mentiond 15 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Ganeti mentions (15)

  • Order/license chaos for VMware products after Broadcom takeover
    We use ganeti and I'm ridiculously happy with it. When I came on board we were using ganeti for dev/stg and VMWare for production. But the difficulty of monitoring VMWare (we were moving away from SAN to local storage, and doing a RAID array monitor was a PITA) and administering (via Windows GUI, which I had to run via a VM on my Linux workstations), plus the licensing weirdness (clusters of size 5 were a sweet... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • VMware is now part of Broadcom
    Yep, happily using https://ganeti.org/ and KVM live migrations - mirrors across hosts. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • Learning more about KVM, oVirt or stick to Proxmox?
    It's more focused on clusters, but you could check out Ganeti. Source: 10 months ago
  • Proxmox, CEPH and kubernetes
    I've been using CEPH as a backend for Ganeti storage for a long time. It's not as complex as some people like to make it out to be. But just like an distributed redundant storage, you really want to have networking that has closer to the bandwidth of your storage devices in order to make it feel like local storage speeds. Usually means 10Gbe or better. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Virtualization without shared storage
    Try Ganeti. It can build VM clusters using DRBD or Ceph (or both at the same time if you want). It takes the pain out of managing DRBD. Source: about 1 year ago
View more

Packer mentions (9)

  • Failed to connect to the host via SSH on Ubuntu 22.04
    If you have just upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04, and you suddenly experience either errors when trying to ssh into hosts, or when running ansible or again when running the ansible provisioner building a packer image, this is probably going to be useful for you. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Create a minimalist OS using Docker Containers and Hashicorp Packer
    I am already using Hashicorp Packer at work and for personal projects and I wanted to test This idea out by wrapping it a single Packer Template file. This reduces the level of maintaining a lot of small scripts, Dockerfiles and configurations and the user can simply trigger a couple of Commands to get a minimalist OS at the end of the process. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
    And while it is a slight increase in complexity, it can be an overall net gain in functionality, configurability and reliability. Much like Packer is far more reliable and practical than manually making VM images sitting in front of a terminal, even though making the initial configuration takes some time. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Customized Ubuntu Images using Packer + QEMU + Cloud-Init & UEFI bootloading
    Hashicorp Packer provides a nice wrapper / abstraction over the QEMU in order to boot the image and use it to set it up on first-boot. Instead of writing really long commands in order to boot up the image using QEMU, Packer provided a nice Configuration Template in a more Readable fashion. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • The journey of sharing a wired USB printer over the network
    Packer seemed like the perfect tool for the job. I have never used it before and wanted to get familiar with the tool. It doesn't come with ARM support out of the box, but there are two community projects to fill that niche. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ganeti and Packer, you can also consider the following products

Kubernetes - Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers

Terraform - Tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

xCAT - xCAT is an open-source distributed computing management software used for the deployment and administration of Linux or AIX based clusters.

Rancher - Open Source Platform for Running a Private Container Service

Apache Helix - A cluster management framework for partitioned and replicated distributed resources

Puppet Enterprise - Get started with Puppet Enterprise, or upgrade or expand.