[Xen-users] Best Practise for Xen in "clustered" Environment

[Stephan Seitz <s.seitz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi listmembers,

we're currently using Xen (3.0.4) on some dedicated Machines. The DomU's 
root-fs as well as
the swapspace are located on the particular machines on lvm (single pv on 
hardware raid).

As we are running a lot of dedicated machines which could also get xenified, we 
assume it's
not the best practise in Installing a Xen "island" on every single machine.

One solution we thougth about was, putting the lvm space which is available on 
every single
machine together via gfs, gnbd or similiar and let the domU's run from a 
netwide available lv.

There are about 10-15 Machines available, each of them with at least 2 GBit 
NICs, Hardware Raid
(3ware and areca) with useable capacity from 400G upto 2T. Architecture is from 
x86 (P4 HT
without VT) upto x64_64 (EMT, Dual Xeon Dualcore with VT), RAM is probably an 
issue, because some
of the older machines doesn't support more than 4G); there are also some 
equivalents equipped
with AMD Processors (Dual Opteron with VT (the AMD equivalent, i think this is 
called pacifica))

The DomU's should only run x86_32 and don't need to be fully virtualized. 
Paravirtualization should
always be enough (or even better).

We're currently really unsure, if this is in general a good idea, also if it's 
practical, how would
you get the lvm space together, as there are uncountable different 
possibilities ?
I would like to see, how you would do (or leave) this?

A SAN/NAS solution is not possible, as we want to consolidate currently 
available hardware. Bying
new storage space is a no-go. Well, relatively low-prized equipment like 
additional NIC's or RAM
shouldn't be a problem. The currently installed "internal" switch is capable of 
any kind of port
truncing, qos and vlan on GBit, so network speed shouldn't be such a problem. 
FC isn't availabe.

If you've an ideas, I would really like to hear from you.

Thanks in advance!


-- 
Stephan Seitz
Senior System Administrator

*netz-haut* e.K.
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