[PLUG] New Server Virtualization

[Ronald Bynoe]

Well, I need replication of a few VMs (prefer dynamic load balancing but
I'm okay with manually moving VMs to achieve that).

It's partially a home lab, and in that sense I'd like to deploy OpenStack
for that purpose (not too hard) but I also run 12 service appliances from
those servers whose availability is important to me, so it also needs to
work (not quite as easy).

I'm concerned that the relative complexity involved in learning OpenStack
will delay getting the server in a production state (acceptable) and
potentially increase downtime as I am running it on somewhat limited
resources (not acceptable) or reduce performance.

>From what I've read, to get good VM performance OpenStack needs at least 4
physical servers. I only have 2, and they're not exactly high end, but in
case the specs help:

* A 2U IBM with dual dual-core Xeons, 24 GB RAM, 140 GB for OS (RAID-1), &
880 GB for VMs (JBOD)
* A 4U AIC Chassis with dual quad-core Opterons, 40 GB RAM, 500 GB for OS
(RAID-1), & 3TB for VMs (JBOD).

My goal is to run a few VMs with HA between both servers, and the rest on
the AIC alone with nightly backups to a separate 6TB NAS.

Learning OpenStack as a job skill though is a priority. It may be living on
a set of devstack VMs under Ganeti, but I feel I'd learn more if my
infrastructure depended on it.

(:

Pleasantly,
Ronald Bynoe
On May 9, 2014 12:33 PM, "Dwight Hubbard" <dwight.hubbard at efausol.com>
wrote:

> I work on Openstack at work and I can tell you it is a very large and
> complex suite of software.  Which makes it very hard to set up and
> configure and makes it less than desirable for home use.  However you might
> want to use it at home if you want to get experience working with it, are
> interested in being able to build tooling to deploy vms using either EC2 or
> Openstack Nova apis that cloud providers use or you want to use some of the
> more advanced functionality such as virtualized networking, support for
> 802.11q vlan tagged networks, integration with ceph/gluster distributed
> filesystems, object storage,, etc.  Generally I'd say it's overkill for
> most home use though.
>
> If you only want to run Linux and don't require the ability to run kernel
> modules you might want to look at container technologies like docker and
> coreos.  If you need VMs and want replication you could look at ganeti.
>
>
> On Thu, May 8, 2014 at 9:51 AM, <brooks at netgate.net> wrote:
>
> >
> > Take a look at Ganeti:
> >
> >      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0NpwjXEvyQ
> >
> > The talk provides an introduction to Ganeti.
> >
> > This and other presentations can be found here:
> >     http://code.google.com/p/ganeti/wiki/Publications
> >
> > Ganeti comes from Google, it's used internally to provide various
> > infrastructure as a service services to Google itself. It's much simpler
> > than OpenStack and IMO (for many reasons) provides a much better solution
> > for small cloud deployments than OpenStack. This is a mature cloud stack,
> > it's clean, simple, and it's easy to operate and maintain. You can get a
> > fully redundant, including storage, cloud up with just 2 nodes.
> >
> > Kevin
> >
> > On Thu, 8 May 2014, Ronald Bynoe wrote:
> >
> > > So I just got a new server, and the rest of the components to build it
> > will
> > > be arriving this weekend. I'm going to assemble it this weekend and
> start
> > > work on the OS next weekend. I've used VirtualBox to run VMs in the
> past,
> > > and recently migrated all of my servers to KVM.
> > >
> > > This new server though will grow my home lab to 6U with a total of 16
> > cores
> > > and 64 GB of RAM between two servers. I'm considering moving to
> OpenStack
> > > for my mini home cloud. It'll be live, so I'd prefer not to use
> devstack,
> > > but this is going to be a much bigger undertaking for me than my past
> > > server experiences!
> > >
> > > I've begun reading through the OpenStack documentation, but it is
> > > definitely geared toward much larger deployments than just 2 servers,
> but
> > > they're also targeting running more than my 8 VMs, I'm also not
> terribly
> > > concerned with High Availability, I'll just do backups and use RAID for
> > now.
> > >
> > > That said, does anyone on the list have hands on experience with
> > > small-scale cloud deployment who might be willing to offer advice as I
> > get
> > > started with this?
> > >
> > > Pleasantly,
> > > Ronald Bynoe
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