[CentOS] Clustering solutions - mail, www, storage.

Wed Jan 11 23:54:08 UTC 2012
Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com>

On Jan 10, 2012, at 2:59 PM, Rafał Radecki <radecki.rafal at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all.
> 
> I am currently working for a hosting provider in a 100+ linux hosts'
> environment. We have www, mail HA solutions, as storage we mainly use
> NFS at the moment. We are also using DRBD, Heartbeat, Corosync.
> 
> I am now gathering info to make a cluster with:
> - two virtualization nodes (active master and passive slave);
> - two storage nodes (for vm files) used by mentioned virtualization
> nodes (also active/passive).
> 
> For virtualization I am thinking to use OpenVZ or KVM. For storage NFS
> or iSCSI. Could you please share your experiences with these
> technologies? Which one would you use and why? Are there any good
> alternatives in CentOS?

For Linux virtualization on a scale greater then a couple of hosts I'd buy VMware and get a good SAN box with redundancy, say EMC, 3Par, NetApp or one of the middle tier like Equallogic, Lefthand or Compellent.

Otherwise a Xen cluster with an NFS store for the VM files (ease of management) and iSCSI for their data partitions (performance) using DRBD for fault tolerance.

-Ross