[opensuse-virtual] So what's this group really for?
I noticed the creation of this group earlier today and signed up right away - I've been meaning to play around with xen and such for a while, but sofar I've only made it to vmware and virtualbox for playing a bit with Windows. What I sometimes think about is - do any of you guys use virtualisation in production, and if so, are you using hardware with suitable redundancy? I can't help thinking that a machine with a 20 virtual systems will take town 20 servers when it suffers a hardware problem? /Per Jessen, Zürich -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-virtual+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-virtual+help@opensuse.org
On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 10:50 AM, Per Jessen <per@computer.org> wrote:
I noticed the creation of this group earlier today and signed up right away - I've been meaning to play around with xen and such for a while, but sofar I've only made it to vmware and virtualbox for playing a bit with Windows.
What I sometimes think about is - do any of you guys use virtualisation in production, and if so, are you using hardware with suitable redundancy? I can't help thinking that a machine with a 20 virtual systems will take town 20 servers when it suffers a hardware problem?
/Per Jessen, Zürich
(xen) I use it in production and haven't had any problems. Granted I don't have hardware redundancy, but its not critical either. You can add things like heartbeat and have your vms stored on iscsi or some nas. The bootup time is amazingly fast too. The base is small as long as you aren't using it for anything other than VMs. As for the list, anything to do with virtualization. I was pushing for a xen list, but well they said I have to play nice with others :) Stephen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-virtual+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-virtual+help@opensuse.org
Stephen Shaw wrote:
(xen) I use it in production and haven't had any problems. Granted I don't have hardware redundancy, but its not critical either.
Can you elaborate on that (if you don't mind) ? I'm curious - what kind of non-critical production are you running? I've worked on/with virtual systems for about 20 years, but production was almost always (I hesitate saying "virtually" here ) on the "real thing". The one exception being IBMs PR/SM, which is/was "hardware virtualisation", I suppose.
You can add things like heartbeat and have your vms stored on iscsi or some nas. The bootup time is amazingly fast too. The base is small as long as you aren't using it for anything other than VMs.
I've got a couple of quad-core boxes, and running a few virtual servers sounds like a cool thing to do - I'm just looking for the killer app :-)
As for the list, anything to do with virtualization. I was pushing for a xen list, but well they said I have to play nice with others :)
I think "virtualisation" is the right theme - the issues that crop up have got to be roughly the same, albeit with vm-specific solutions etc. /Per Jessen, Zürich -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-virtual+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-virtual+help@opensuse.org
(xen) I use it in production and haven't had any problems. Granted I don't have hardware redundancy, but its not critical either.
Can you elaborate on that (if you don't mind) ? I'm curious - what kind of non-critical production are you running? I've worked on/with virtual systems for about 20 years, but production was almost always (I hesitate saying "virtually" here ) on the "real thing". The one exception being IBMs PR/SM, which is/was "hardware virtualisation", I suppose.
Its a web/dns server in my closet :) and no one on it pays for it. Granted if the hardware went down I'd panic a little, but I wouldn't owe anyone anything. So fingers crossed :) My main servers (VMs) are allocated an actual partition so I'm not worried about getting the data if needed. Maybe a bit naive there though.
You can add things like heartbeat and have your vms stored on iscsi or some nas. The bootup time is amazingly fast too. The base is small as long as you aren't using it for anything other than VMs.
I've got a couple of quad-core boxes, and running a few virtual servers sounds like a cool thing to do - I'm just looking for the killer app :-)
Then definitely give xen a try. I had fun testing it. Try out the live migration too! roughly a 60 ms downtime. ( you have to have the vm on a central center to all host machines).
As for the list, anything to do with virtualization. I was pushing for a xen list, but well they said I have to play nice with others :)
I think "virtualisation" is the right theme - the issues that crop up have got to be roughly the same, albeit with vm-specific solutions etc.
yes no. and I say that because there is some bad blood between kvm and xen. Also different implementations. Though one list pools a lot more knowledge. Stephen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-virtual+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-virtual+help@opensuse.org
Hi Per, We have ben using Xen for a couple of customer sites over the last 6 months (using SLES 10 sp1) and quite satisfied with it. For all these setups we are using EMC SAN's combined with Dell PowerEdge 2950 making the setup redundant. We don't use disk files but hand out LVM partitions to each guest. Also using heartbeat clustering to manage the Xen hosts with the guests defined as resources in the cluster. This document gave us a good head start : http://www.sandervanvugt.com/heartbeat/xenhadoc.pdf And also check this page for more info : http://www.sandervanvugt.nl/en/aankondigingen/heartbeat-documentation-0 The only real drawback we experienced is that Windows guests ACPI support is a bit unfinished on Xen hosts running 64 bit OS and Live migration is not supported for Windows. This is due to the fact that SLES is using a patched Xen v3.04 and Windows live migration is only supported starting Xen v3.1. A workaround is to pause the Windows guests, and resume them on the other host, resulting in a small delay. Other than that it's been very stable and the performance good. Also I would definitely recommend going for the 64bit host OS version as we found it gives better performance and memory handeling. If you are looking for a more manageable centralized interface and want to avoid the command line (vmware style) you could also have a look at XenSource. It is the most manageable interface I know but on the other hand I expect there will be some very useful management interfaces coming to the other distributions this year. If you are using Novell products you could also have a look at Zenworks Orchestrator , http://www.novell.com/linux/virtualization/ Cheers, Wj On Fri, 2008-04-18 at 18:50 +0200, Per Jessen wrote:
I noticed the creation of this group earlier today and signed up right away - I've been meaning to play around with xen and such for a while, but sofar I've only made it to vmware and virtualbox for playing a bit with Windows.
What I sometimes think about is - do any of you guys use virtualisation in production, and if so, are you using hardware with suitable redundancy? I can't help thinking that a machine with a 20 virtual systems will take town 20 servers when it suffers a hardware problem?
/Per Jessen, Zürich
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-virtual+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-virtual+help@opensuse.org
participants (3)
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Per Jessen -
Stephen Shaw -
Willem Meens