Cannot decide between 1U servers for growing company
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@ntoxicator The next server I buy will be from Xbyte... Unless I go Scale.
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@ntoxicator pricing seems to be relatively ok with 3250M5's, my concern is they seem a bit dated on specs vs others. The BIOS on them is a bit of a huge PITA in my opinion. Are you still thinking of rolling your own or is a prebuilt solution still on the radar for you?
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I could easily build our own again using Supermicro hardware. its trusty. only downside is warranty and such
But I suppose, if running in HA 2-3 servers within XenServer.. would be a non issue if one had a hardware issue.
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@ntoxicator agreed on supermicro - good gear, but the company is built to work with vendors, not so much end users. On the Scale side, we don't use Xen - too much overhead on the l3->l1 calls. We use KVM at the base, then made it cluster aware
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And here i was getting blasted about ProxMox and KVM... I personally feel KVM is superior
Just XenServer uses XEN hypervisor and packages their own features etc. dont know all details, just 10k foot view.
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@ntoxicator I can go over what we do with you - no strings attached. I have a web demo that I do weekly on thursdays at 1:30 central time. http://bit.ly/HC3LiveDemo if you want to come. As far as KVM goes, being that it is a pair of kernel modules, it allows us to do tons of stuff that we otherwise couldn't
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I'll see if i can join. have another meeting at 2PM EST. if I'm available i'll hop on
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@ntoxicator if you can, great, if not, that is fine, I do them pretty much every week
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@ntoxicator said:
And here i was getting blasted about ProxMox and KVM... I personally feel KVM is superior
Just XenServer uses XEN hypervisor and packages their own features etc. dont know all details, just 10k foot view.
XenServer is made by the Xen team at Linux, just as KVM is. Both KVM and Xen come from the same team. XenServer and XCP are just the Linux Foundation's packaging of Xen as a full product rather than just as a component like Xen itself that you need to build your own system around.
KVM is very good, as is Xen. The biggest difference is that KVM lacks the ecosystem. So if you want it you normally get it packaged by someone else and Xen you normally get as XenServer. Just think of XenServer as the reference distro of Xen.
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thank you. Wonderful explanation.
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No problem
Some extra info... big other providers of packaged Xen systems are Ubuntu, Suse and Oracle. Big backers of KVM are Red Hat and IBM.
Big clouds using Xen: Amazon, Rackspace and IBM
Big clouds using KVM: Digital Ocean, VultrXen is more powerful "out of the box." KVM is more extendible.
Xen is more performant for Linux workloads. KVM is more performant for Windows workloads. Both are super fast and performance is not normally a deciding factor.
Besides Scale, lots of other vendors build on KVM as well for similar reasoning. One vendor that we work with regularly that uses KVM because of the ease of automation is Unitrends.
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ProxMox I avoid, KVM I do not
It's ProxMox themselves that are the issues there, not that they are built on KVM. -
You the man. Amazing information here. Goes a long ways.
You think there would be an issue upgrading the current xenserver node to 6.5? Presently 6.0
I have 6.1 ISO sitting here right now that some other nodes were running - but I migrated them to Proxmox for testing/development.
Aways worried something will 'break'
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@ntoxicator said:
So if anyone can explain to me
To do away with centralized storage such as what we have now and I've been moving to. I suppose this is what I've grown use to.
In order to have localized storage at the node/hypervisor level. one or many of the hypervisors would be storing all the data and sharing out the NFS? Then its replicated between? probably with DRBD Storage.
however, would would this be done with Citrix Xen Server for instance?
So I just wrote up an entire quote on this for my org.
Your Xenservers would have enough capacity (storage) to run everything you have today, plus room for growth. You build the Xen installation on both host, and then configure them into a XenPool.
This allows the VM's to migrate between the two (or more host) in the event you need to work on them.
For free 2-Node HA, look into HA-Lizard.
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@ntoxicator said:
But wouldnt all that storage replication STILL be handled over 1Gbe backbone??!
Bond the Ethernet together or install a 10GbE NIC into each host.
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ethernet is bonded.
Could install 10GbE cards on servers. But the NAS would still be limitation as does not support PCI-e cards.
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@ntoxicator said:
ethernet is bonded.
Could install 10GbE cards on servers. But the NAS would still be limitation as does not support PCI-e cards.
He's saying you should get rid of the NAS and have all storage on the servers.
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@ntoxicator said:
ethernet is bonded.
Could install 10GbE cards on servers. But the NAS would still be limitation as does not support PCI-e cards.
But your NAS isn't used as a place for your VM's to reside. As a backup target sure, but the NAS is worthless in the case of local storage on your Xen Hosts.
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Understood. So would have to resort in Local storage on server an dutilize the HA-Lizard HA-iSCSI or HA-Lizard on the node....
Appears to be free module/software - was unaware of it. Is it proven?
NAS is handing out iSCSI LUN's as an FYI
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Also spec'ing 2 servers with internal storage with 4+ drives.. I see as being more expensive
As the server vendors charge high amounts for storage disks. As I'm sure folks would recommend SAS drives over consumer 7200RPM Sata
I really like the HGST NAS drives. High MTBF and great speed.
