XenServer, local storage, and redundancy/backups
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@travisdh1 said:
@StrongBad said:
I am pretty sure that CEPH and Xen can coexist, but I don't know about with XenServer. Doing so would likely be very awkward at best.
Possibly. Now I want to go experiment with XenServer and CEPH.
Would make for a fun project.
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@travisdh1 said:
@StrongBad said:
I am pretty sure that CEPH and Xen can coexist, but I don't know about with XenServer. Doing so would likely be very awkward at best.
Possibly. Now I want to go experiment with XenServer and CEPH.
The most recent articles that I can find about it talk about the ability to make XS a Ceph Client, but not necessarily a Ceph node. This is the direction I'd like to go long term with our storage situation. Get three whitebox servers with a lot of storage (relative to how much I have had) and run Ceph on them to present a back end for XS.
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What kind of workload do you run? Mostly Linux, Windows, etc? You have four nodes today, right? Anything keeping you from dropping to fewer?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@travisdh1 said:
@StrongBad said:
I am pretty sure that CEPH and Xen can coexist, but I don't know about with XenServer. Doing so would likely be very awkward at best.
Possibly. Now I want to go experiment with XenServer and CEPH.
Would make for a fun project.
After I start the next upload I'll have some time. Very experimental as I think I'm going to fire up a XenServer instance in VirtualBox with like 10 10GB HDD, see where I end up and if I finish it before the upload completes.
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@scottalanmiller said:
What kind of workload do you run? Mostly Linux, Windows, etc? You have four nodes today, right? Anything keeping you from dropping to fewer?
On these hosts it is all Linux. It is mostly processor and memory intensive compute processes with not a lot of storage required at this point. I'm shooting to start out with just two hosts initially and see if, with better management and transparency, we can manage with the two newer hosts and leave the other two for testing or other duties.
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If you can get down to two, then you can go for bigger hosts down the road. Start with two socket hosts if you want, but you can go to four socket hosts to get double the density without getting more nodes. This allows you to do more and more to stay with less management. Going to CEPH only makes sense if you are going to a lot of nodes. It's worth a lot to go to fewer. Since Linux has no licensing complications from having lots of CPUs like Windows does, you get that extra benefit for "free".
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@scottalanmiller said:
If you can get down to two, then you can go for bigger hosts down the road. Start with two socket hosts if you want, but you can go to four socket hosts to get double the density without getting more nodes. This allows you to do more and more to stay with less management. Going to CEPH only makes sense if you are going to a lot of nodes. It's worth a lot to go to fewer. Since Linux has no licensing complications from having lots of CPUs like Windows does, you get that extra benefit for "free".
They are already quad socket motherboards, so I have that going for me...
At this point I have zero visibility into what our actual workloads are because of the version of OpenStack Cloud we're running on, so I'm going in a bit blind. That is why I'm going to try to just run two hosts and add as necessary.
My reasoning for looking at Ceph in the long run is that I'd like to centralize all of our storage. We currently have an Oracle (Sun) NAS that is very expensive to maintain, and is a single point of failure. This is where all of our critical data is stored (not my design). It is also the backend for some of the VMs running in our existing cloud.
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Wow, well that could make more sense then. If the CEPH is going to power a bunch of stuff. Look at Dell R720xd nodes for CEPH, should be pretty awesome.
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How bad is the OpenStack situation? I mean, would tackling the NAS replacement first, by putting in CEPH nodes, and getting it working as a NAS replacement, phasing that out and having a testing CEPH platform as a starting point and then adding XenServer as needed make sense?
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@scottalanmiller said:
How bad is the OpenStack situation? I mean, would tackling the NAS replacement first, by putting in CEPH nodes, and getting it working as a NAS replacement, phasing that out and having a testing CEPH platform as a starting point and then adding XenServer as needed make sense?
It is broken at the moment. We're running at about 60-70% of capacity due to one of the servers deciding to take its processors and go home. I'd prefer to do it that way, but my priority is to get everything functional on the front end.
We have decent backups of the NAS and an expensive support contract so downtime there isn't as concerning in the short term.
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Okay, makes sense then. I'd lean towards XenServer with local storage then. You can migrate to CEPH when it is ready. This would get a single node up "instantly" and let you move others as the opportunity arises.
