On 09/16/2011 01:10 PM, Ed Heron wrote:
I've been considering this type of setup for a distributed virtualization setup. I have several small locations and we would be more comfortable having a host in each.
I was nervous about running the firewall as a virtual machine, though if nobody screams bloody murder, I'll start exploring it further as it could reduce machine count at each location by 2 (backup fw).
I've been running IPCop as a VM for a few years now. Works like a charm. You can set up VPNs between IPCop VMs as well if you like, effectively bridging LANs at each location. Just be sure that subnets are distinct at each location.
I like less hardware. Fewer points of failure means more reliability (with the exception of redundant parts of course) as well as cost savings.
I'm not as paranoid about the host providing storage to the VM's directly, for booting.
There might be a good reason for doing so that hasn't occurred to me. I wouldn't lose much sleep over it. Whatever works. ;)
I'm considering using DRBD to replicate storage on 2 identical hosts to allow fail-over in the case of a host hardware failure.
A fine idea, if you can swing it. To be honest though, with the HDDs on raid-1, the likelihood of failure is rather small. Depending on your cost of down time, it might do just as well to have spare parts (or a spare machine) standing by cold. Depends on the business need though. I do like having spare hardware at hand in any case.
What kind of VM management tool do you use; VMM or something else?
As I said, I've been using VMware Server up to this point, so I've been using that web interface primarily, with cli configuration editing where needed.
As I'll be migrating to KDE/CentOS very soon, does anyone have recommendations? TIA.