[racktables-users] Re: What virtual infrastructure do you use?
- From: Jonathan Thurman <jonathan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: racktables-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2011 20:25:28 -0800
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 7:52 AM, Mills, Matt <mmills@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> All,
>
> Was mulling over some Racktables code and I'm curious what types of
> virtualization infrastructure is most prevalent and how differently its
> used. I know we use VMware and it groups hosts into Clusters and allows VM
> migration across any host in a cluster seamlessly;
> Do you use something different and if so does it work in a different manner?
This is a tricky subject because everyone and their dog it seems has
written some kind of hypervisor tool kit. A few popular ones that I
am aware of all work in different ways, and can be configured in
different ways too.
VMWare: Like you said *can* use shared storage and clustered hosts
where the guests could run on any host. You can also put a guest on
local storage, or storage that only say 2 of 3 nodes can access. In
the case of ESXi, you only have the single host and no HA, but guests
could still be stored on multiple volumes.
Proxmox: Supports local storage per host, and shared storage for
multiple hosts. No automatic failover though, at least not in the
versions that I have used (1.x series).
Ganeti: Another front-end for managing Linux based virtual servers
(Xen/KVM). It takes more of a share-nothing approach from the
discussions I have seen on it. A guest is assigned a primary and a
secondary server to which the data is replicated at the block level
(DRBD). So in a 3 host cluster with 3 guests, each host could be a
primary for one guest, and a secondary for another. If two hosts died
you would lose at least one guest.
I guess what I am getting at is that for RackTables to store
information about VM Guests, and where they exist is a very in-depth
topic. Realistically in VMware with HA / Vmotion the guests could be
auto-balancing between hosts all day long. What you do know is where
the guest is stored and what hosts have access to that storage.
> Does it have a management server that provides any kind of API for accessing
> data?
I haven't really looked into this aspect of any virtualization
solution, but it is a good question to ask! Having some even update a
guests location would be the only true way to know where a machine was
at any given time. I am sure the open source ones could be motified
if they don't alreay have this feature, but that is beyond this
scope...
I look forward to seeing what you come up with!
-Jonathan
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