[CentOS] kvm cluster w/ c6

Sun Oct 20 06:22:12 UTC 2013
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

In our development lab, I am installing 4 new servers, that I want to 
use for hosting KVM.   each server will have its own direct attached 
raid.   I'd love to be able to 'pool' this storage, but over gigE, I 
probably shouldn't even try.

most of the VM's will be running CentOS 5 and 6,  some of the VM's will 
be postgresql database dev/test servers, others will be running java 
messaging workloads, and various test jobs.

to date, my experience with KVM is bringing up one c6 VM on a c6 host, 
manually w/ virt-install and virsh...

stupid questions ...

whats the best storage setup for KVM when using direct attached raid?  
surely using disk image files on a parent ext4/xfs file system isn't the 
best performance?    Should I use host lvm logical volumes as guest 
vdisks?   we're going to be running various database servers in dev/test 
and wanting at least one or another at a time to really be able to get 
some serious iops.

its virt-manager worth using, or is it too simplistic/incomplete ?

will virt-manager or some other tool 'unify' management of these 4 VM 
hosts, or will it be pretty much, me-the-admin keeps track of what vm is 
on what host and runs the right virt-manager and manages it all fairly 
manually?



                                          "That may be the easy way, but 
its not the Cowboy Way"

-- 
john r pierce                                      37N 122W
somewhere on the middle of the left coast