Tried Eucalyptus

The documentation is pretty appalling. Obviously such a system requires multiple servers to the build the cloud on so why is the documentation riddled with instructions such as "Copy the x509 cert to your machine" and "type sudo somecommand" without telling you which actual machine you should be working on.

Then there are annoying things like "Check that the Cloud Controller is running before continuing". erm, OK, how the fuck do I do that then?

I did get it working eventually (I think), but I still haven't figured out how to actually host a virtual machine on it.

Having said all that, I am STILL struggling to understand what the difference between this sort of "cloud" versus say, a vmware or virtualbox hosted machine.

Paris, because I'm obviously easily confused too.