[CentOS] How to prevent virtual machines running twice on the disk images?

Fri May 11 11:34:24 UTC 2012
Regendoerp, Achim <Achim.Regendoerp at galacoral.com>

> -----Original Message-----
> From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On
> Behalf Of Theo Band
> Sent: 11 May 2012 12:28
> To: CentOS mailing list
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] How to prevent virtual machines running twice on the
> disk images?
>
> On 05/11/2012 01:07 PM, Regendoerp, Achim wrote:
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org]
> On
> >> Behalf Of Theo Band
> >> Sent: 11 May 2012 11:51
> >> To: CentOS mailing list
> >> Subject: [CentOS] How to prevent virtual machines running twice on
> >> the disk images?
> >>
> >> I use KVM on two identical centos5 hosts.
> >>
> >> I can live migrate the virtual machines from one to the other and it
> >> works great. Once I do this, I can see VM definitions on both hosts
> >> using virt- manager or virsh list --all On one machine the VM is
> >> running, on the other it reports "shut off".
> >> The disk images are accessible to both host machines and I want to
> >> have only one running a the time (of course). If the VM locks up, I
> >> could by mistake think that the machine is not running and try to start it
> on the wrong host.
> >>
> >> My question is, how can I prevent host A from starting a "shut off"
> >> VM that actually has been migrated to host B? The VM could actually
> >> be running on any another host. It could also have been crashed. The
> >> most simple solution would be some sort of lock file placed next to
> >> the disk image location, so seen by all hosts. But perhaps there is
> >> another way of working with virt- manager that I am not aware of?
> >>
> >> Theo
> > Are those machines clustered? I used drbd/pacemaker/corosync to
> > achieve something similar across two CentOS hosts with KVM machines,
> > and the VM can only be started on the master node where the DRBD drive
> > is mounted and accessible. Live migrations are fairly easy too with
> > this method
> >
> No, not clustered.
> drbd I do use, but that means a drbd block devices for every individual vm. I
> tried that but find it a lot of effort to maintain. One shared
> (NFS) filesystem gives a lot more freedom to move a VM to a machine host
> machine that has a lower load. I don't mind doing that by hand. It's not for
> high availability.
>
> Theo

Hm, I've used one block device for multiple VMs, which made it easier, and prevent the hassle with x block devices for x VMs.
Other than that, no idea if virt-manager can do what you're looking for.

Achim




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