[CentOS] best practices in using shared storage for XEN Virtual Machines and auto-failover?

Pasi Kärkkäinen pasik at iki.fi
Fri Oct 15 21:03:30 UTC 2010


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




More information about the CentOS mailing list