2008/4/11, Greg Freemyer :

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 12:17 AM, Ciro Iriarte wrote:

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Hi, I'm installing SLES10SP1 (think of Opensuse 10.2, more or less) on a Proliant DL380 G5 to run Xen Domains. Later, another machine will join the party, so I can have two Xen hosts to move back and forth the VMs on the fly.

The thing is, in a perfect world I would have a single LUN for all my VMs and would use a cluster aware LVM solution to assign disks for the domains.

Back to reality, I don't want to use EVMS, since it adds another layer of complexity and will be dropped in future releases of the distro. Are there any other options than the next two?:

- Use a big LUN with OCFS2 to host file based images, losing performance & flexibility (i don't like it) - Nag the SAN admin every time I need to add a new domain, so he creates a new LUN for me (a 500GB, 20GB or 1GB one, who knows), keeping performance, but losing flexibility (and maybe even wasting disk space).

Another question, can I use lvm inside paravirtual domains?, all the guides I found advice to create volumes outside the domain to assing them to FS, example:

/dev/vmdisks/dom0-root /dev/vmdisks/dom1-root /dev/vmdisks/dom0-home /dev/vmdisks/dom1-home /dev/vmdisks/dom0-var /dev/vmdisks/dom1-var /dev/vmdisks/dom0-usr /dev/vmdisks/dom1-usr

But this way I won't be able to have domains on different hosts, (a safe way at least, since I need this to be reliable)

Regards, Ciro

Ciro,

Have you looked into heartbeat (linux-ha). It is part of SLES and is part of their support pacakage. It has had XEN support for a year or so.

http://www.linux-ha.org/XenResource

If that is the way you go you may want to subscribe to their mailing list and ask again there.

You can subscribe via one of the links at http://www.linux-ha.org/ContactUs

Greg -- Greg Freemyer Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer First 99 Days Litigation White Paper - http://www.norcrossgroup.com/forms/whitepapers/99%20Days%20whitepaper.pdf

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I'm currently using heartbeat on sles9. It can help in VM relocation to avoid downtime, but i'm more concerned about the VM disk management, heartbeat2 can do nothing about that.... Regards, Ciro -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

2008/4/11, mmelyp@gmail.com :

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Another question, can I use lvm inside paravirtual domains?, all the guides I found advice to create volumes outside the domain to assing them to FS, example:

/dev/vmdisks/dom0-root /dev/vmdisks/dom1-root /dev/vmdisks/dom0-home /dev/vmdisks/dom1-home /dev/vmdisks/dom0-var /dev/vmdisks/dom1-var /dev/vmdisks/dom0-usr /dev/vmdisks/dom1-usr

Yes, you can use LVM inside paravirtual domain's xvda disk.

If I use block devices (LUNs) as vdisks, wouldn't the volumes be discovered by dom0?, I was thinking that at least I should exclude those devices from the lvm discovery process on the host, right? CI.- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On 2008-04-13T18:37:15, Greg Freemyer wrote:

Per http://www.novell.com/linux2/volumemanagement/strategy.html there is ongoing effort to create a "cluster stack" that will use cLVM to manage the LVs and then heartbeat on top of that. I don't know how well advanced that is, but it sounds like you should either stick with EVMS or move to cLVM.

C-LVM2 will appear on openSUSE earliest in 11.1, and SLE11. Regards, Lars -- Teamlead Kernel, SuSE Labs, Research and Development SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." -- Oscar Wilde -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org