On Fri, 2010-02-05 at 07:57 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
Bo Lynch wrote:
Currently we are doing the low tech method. Daily and weekly backups both onsite and off along with RAID and all that other good stuff. I was just wondering if clustering was a better way of handling things. Thanks for the info.
If you are looking at VMware, ESX(i) is the nicest of the bunch but moderately expensive for the full version that does clustering and live moves - and you also need a highly reliable iscsi disk server. But even the free version is very nice in terms of the management tools, low overhead, and the ability to overcommit the host's RAM. You could start by building shadow copies of most of your servers that could be activated as needed, with perhaps a few being live with application level failover (heartbeat, drbd, database replication, etc.). ESXi is also a nice lab framework for testing new thing.
There are also a lot community scripts for management as well.
http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-9852
-- Les Ault VCP, RHCE Linux Systems Administrator, Office of Information Technology Computing Systems Services: Technical Services and Research
The University of Tennessee 135C5 Kingston Pike Building 2309 Kingston Pike Knoxville, TN 37996 Phone: 865-974-1640