Hi all,
Can anyone pleas tell me what would be best practice to use shared storage with virtual machines, especially when it involved high availability / automated failover between 2 XEN servers?
i.e. if I setup 2x identical XEN servers, each with say 16GB RAM, 4x 1GB NIC's, etc. Then I need the xen domU's to auto failover between the 2 servers if either goes down (hardware failure / overload / kernel updates / etc).
What is the best way to connect a NAS / SAN to these 2 servers for this kind of setup to work flawlessly? The NAS can export iSCSI, NFS, SMB, etc. I'm sure I could even use ATAOE if needed
On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 01:25:01PM +0200, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
Hi all,
Can anyone pleas tell me what would be best practice to use shared storage with virtual machines, especially when it involved high availability / automated failover between 2 XEN servers?
i.e. if I setup 2x identical XEN servers, each with say 16GB RAM, 4x 1GB NIC's, etc. Then I need the xen domU's to auto failover between the 2 servers if either goes down (hardware failure / overload / kernel updates / etc).
What is the best way to connect a NAS / SAN to these 2 servers for this kind of setup to work flawlessly? The NAS can export iSCSI, NFS, SMB, etc. I'm sure I could even use ATAOE if needed
You could use Citrix XenServer, or XCP.. they're based on CentOS 5, and they support shared storage with iSCSI out-of-the-box on multi-host pools.
If you go with the "plain" CentOS route you need to script/manage it yourself.
-- Pasi
On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 11:03 PM, Pasi Kärkkäinen pasik@iki.fi wrote:
On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 01:25:01PM +0200, Rudi Ahlers wrote:
Hi all,
Can anyone pleas tell me what would be best practice to use shared storage with virtual machines, especially when it involved high availability / automated failover between 2 XEN servers?
i.e. if I setup 2x identical XEN servers, each with say 16GB RAM, 4x 1GB NIC's, etc. Then I need the xen domU's to auto failover between the 2 servers if either goes down (hardware failure / overload / kernel updates / etc).
What is the best way to connect a NAS / SAN to these 2 servers for this kind of setup to work flawlessly? The NAS can export iSCSI, NFS, SMB, etc. I'm sure I could even use ATAOE if needed
You could use Citrix XenServer, or XCP.. they're based on CentOS 5, and they support shared storage with iSCSI out-of-the-box on multi-host pools.
If you go with the "plain" CentOS route you need to script/manage it yourself.
-- Pasi
Did you even read my whole message?
What is the best way to connect a NAS / SAN to these 2 servers for this kind of setup to work flawlessly? The NAS can export iSCSI, NFS, SMB, etc. I'm sure I could even use ATAOE if needed
Unless you want to use cluster aware filesystems I'd say NFS is your best bet.
I am very happy with RedHat Cluster Suite and GFS2 on a shared SAN storage (i.e. scsi block device), since RedHat Cluster Suite not only handles the file systems but also looks to the availability of the xen vms (live migration, restart, etc.).
Dirk
Am 14.10.10 13:25, schrieb Rudi Ahlers:
Hi all,
Can anyone pleas tell me what would be best practice to use shared storage with virtual machines, especially when it involved high availability / automated failover between 2 XEN servers?
i.e. if I setup 2x identical XEN servers, each with say 16GB RAM, 4x 1GB NIC's, etc. Then I need the xen domU's to auto failover between the 2 servers if either goes down (hardware failure / overload / kernel updates / etc).
What is the best way to connect a NAS / SAN to these 2 servers for this kind of setup to work flawlessly? The NAS can export iSCSI, NFS, SMB, etc. I'm sure I could even use ATAOE if needed
-
Dirk -
Drew -
Pasi Kärkkäinen -
Rudi Ahlers