[ale] Small Clusters for VMs

[Scott Plante]

DJ, I meant to ask on the other thread, but how do you run KVM? I know XenServer and I believe ESXi get installed on the bare metal. XenServer is a kind of stripped down Linux distribution of it's own. I know you *can* run Xen and KVM on openSUSE, CentOS and some other general distributions. 


So is there a KVM "optimized" or KVM specific distribution if you're setting up a server just to run KVM, or if not, what distro do you recommend for KVM? Or would you just recommend whatever distro we're already familiar with (that supports KVM)? 

Scott 
----- Original Message -----

From: "DJ-Pfulio" <DJPfulio at jdpfu.com> 
To: "Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts" <ale at ale.org> 
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2016 10:49:14 AM 
Subject: Re: [ale] Small Clusters for VMs 

Thanks for responding. 

Sheepdog is the storage backend. This is the way cloud stuff works on 
the cheap. Not a NAS. It is distributed storage with a minimal 
redundancy set (I'm planning 3 copies). Sheepdog only works with qemu 
according to research, which is fine. 

Sure, I could setup a separate storage NAS (I'd use AoE for this), but 
that isn't needed. I already have multiple NFS servers, but don't use 
them for hosting VMs today. They are used for data volumes, not redundancy. 

>> Opinions follow (danger if you love what I don't) << 

Won't be using oVirt (really RHEL only and seems to be 50+ different 
F/LOSS projects in 500 different languages [I exaggerate] ) or XenServer 
(bad taste after running it 4 yrs). I've never regretted switching from 
ESX/ESXi and Xen to KVM, not once. 

And won't be dedicating the entire machines just to being storage or VM 
hosts, so proxmox clusters aren't an option. The migration from plain 
VMs into sheepdog appears pretty straight forward (at least on youtube). 

Just doing research today. Need to sleep on it. Probably won't try 
anything until Sunday night. 


On 10/28/2016 10:23 AM, Beddingfield, Allen wrote: 
> Will you have shared storage available (shared LUN or high performance NFS for the virtual hard drives that all hosts can access?) 
> If so, the easiest free out of the box setup is XenServer or oVirt. I'm familiar with XenServer, but there are some oVirt fans on here, I know. 
> 
> -- 
> Allen Beddingfield 
> Systems Engineer 
> Office of Information Technology 
> The University of Alabama 
> Office 205-348-2251 
> allen at ua.edu 
> 
> On 10/28/16, 9:17 AM, "ale-bounces at ale.org on behalf of DJ-Pfulio" <ale-bounces at ale.org on behalf of DJPfulio at jdpfu.com> wrote: 
> 
> I'm a little behind the times. Looking to run a small cluster of VM 
> hosts, just 2-5 physical nodes. 
> 
> Reading implies it is pretty easy with 2-5 nodes using a mix of 
> sheepdog, corosync and pacemaker running on qemu-kvm VM hosts. 
> 
> Is that true? Any advice from people who've done this already? 
> 
> So, is this where you'd start for small home/biz redundant VM cluster? 
> 
> I've never done clustering on Linux, just Unix with those expensive 
> commercial tools and that was many years ago. 
> 
> 
> In related news - Fry's has a Core i3-6100 CPU for $88 today with their 
> emailed codes. That CPU is almost 2x faster than a first gen Core 
> i5-750 desktop CPU. Clustering for data redundancy at home really is 
> possible with just 2 desktop systems these days. This can be used with 
> or without RAID (any sort). 
> 
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