Sounds like its worth a look.

Out of interest, when you say you wanted 'more' what was it that Proxmox isn't providing for you?

Although I note that according to it's website "This is not a bare-metal solution. See it as a light weight agent installed on physical machines and a web interface you can install anywhere." So it could be used as an alternative interface for Proxmox I'd imagine (it supports both OVZ and KVM - the 2 VM technologies used in Proxmox). Otherwise you'd still need to build your environment (and doesn't look like it supports OpenStack ATM).

But more of a demonstration. It is a Live distro only - which allows the saving of persistant data so it could be used but I don't think it is really intended as such (but perhaps I'm wrong?).

Personally I don't think you can go past Proxmox, especially since it now includes TKL OVZ templates for direct download from within the WebUI, but perhaps that's just me... I have been using it now for 3 or 4 years and find it rock solid. The v2.x interface is not quite as intuative as v1.x but is also much more powerful.

As for the things that you raised earlier with PVE, multi-tenancy has only just been added (as of v2.0 - last year) but I have found it pretty good so far (and this I think is partially why the interface has lost some of it's simplicity). I have a number of machines that are now administered by others and it works well. Assuming that by multi-tier you mean something like clustering (ie multiple physical hosts) then Proxmox has been doing that since before OpenStack was a project.

Did you test the performance of OVZ containers vs other forms of virtualisation? For me that's the killer feature of PVE, incredibly light weight OVZ containers for Linux and KVM for everything else (which works quite well). The PVE devs offer great free support too (via their forums and mailing list).

I'm certainly not suggesting that OpenStack is bad, but from my understanding it's aimed at a slightly different market. OpenStack is more for big enterprise, whereas Proxmox is more for small to medium enterprise (and I'm not sure where ANSOS fits...?).

Anyway like I say if you don't like the WebUI of PVE but do like the Archipel UI then perhaps investigating running Archipel on PVE may be a good blend for you?

I haven't but I would assume that you could just install it (like any other package)... Although perhaps there is a conflict? If so, I suspect that even then it wouldn't be an issue (because if you were planning to use Archipel then you wouldn't care if breaking the PVE management was required to set up usage with Archipel).

Obviously though if you did that (removed components of PVE) then you wouldn't probably have a lot of luck getting support from PVE should something go wrong.

Perhaps installing from scratch is a better option for you? If you use Debian 64 bit as a base then you could still install the PVE kernel (which AFAIK is the only project producing a kernel that supports both OVZ and KVM), but perhaps that's not important to you either?

But would it break KVM and OVZ? Perhaps it would, but there's only one way to find out!! Personally I'd test that before you go to the effort of doing a full install from scratch.

Unless you compile your own kernel then you're probably need to at least use the PVE kernel. I don't know of anyone else who produces a kernel that supports both KVM abd OVZ (all other kernels that I know of only support one or the other, and both KVM and OVZ require a kernel that supports them...)

The only other realistic option I see would be to use 2 separate physical machines - one for KVM and one for OVZ. Personally it seems like a lot of work to go to for a setup that you may struggle to find support for with a slightly prettier UI. Unless there is some functionality that is missing from Proxmox but included in Archipel?

IMO OpenStack is probably a great solution for large businesses and for hosting companies, but unless you have a ton of hardware laying around unused then IMO Proxmox is a much better solution.

Proxmox itself is quite scalable and you can have multiple nodes. However each node is a complete system that can run independently if need be; whereas OpenStack by design run different services on different nodes (although you can combine them, but they recommend that only for testing, not production). FWIW I know of at least one hosting company that uses a farm of Proxmox nodes...