RE: [Xen-users] XCP Test workstation

["Brett Westover" <bwestover@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>I'm sure there will be various opinions on this but after going down the 
>"really expensive but rarely upgradable" path I just build commodity servers 
>for XCP now. Each host has a 2u case, hexicore cpu, 16 GB of ram, a local 
>drive that's currently used for nothing much and two network interfaces. With 
>each I buy a 240 GB SSD that goes in the SAN. So for $1000 I can drop one 
>machine into the rack, plug in power, both network cables and slide the SSD 
>into the SAN box and I've just expanded capacity by 30 VMs. Each VM gets 512 
>MB of ram and 7 GB of storage space. Any other storage can be pulled from 
>larger disk based SAN shares via iSCSI or NFS. This allows me to expand very 
>quickly and at a minimal cost. 

>For testing purposes you could do without the SSD drives. I'm looking at 
>building a 128 core cloud to teach cloud computing using the same types of 
>replaceable hosts. The cores will be divided up into smaller 16 core clouds 
>each given to team of 4 students.

>I think it would all depend on what you plan on doing with your cloud. 


>Grant McWilliams
>http://grantmcwilliams.com/

>Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use Windows." 
>Now they have two problems.

I agree with that philosophy, but what how do you ensure compatibility both 
with the XCP software, and with each other? 

I started with the XenServer HCL that Citrix provides, and it led me to believe 
it was fairly strict on what would work. 
(Or at least what they were willing to support, which I know is different)

When you say "build commodity servers" are you referring to something 
"standard" from Dell, HP, IBM or do you mean "build" as in buy a case, and a 
board/CPU/RAM, hard disks etc?

What you describe sounds like a dream compared to where we are currently. To 
expand capacity by that same amount we'd be looking at 10x the cost for 
hardware and software.

Brett Westover





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