I wanted to discuss an alternative to Vmware ESX Cluster for the Linux admins.. This cluster supports all the features of ESX and is completely free.
- Virtual Machine Live Migration
- Self Healing
- Clustered Filesystem
- No Need for expensive SAN
- CTDB LVM load balancing
- Very Reliable and stable
- Parallel CIFS SMB (windows 2008 replacement) much faster!
- Run ~20 Windows, Linux, Solaris hosts on 2 servers!
There are so many high spec machines sit at idle, you can really do quite allot with 2 servers and create a cluster to support many different applications and even virtualization for an entire infrastructure. Your environment will be highly available and fault tolerant using these techniques.
We should start with 2 identical machines each with 2 or more hard drives. One of these drives will be used for the operating system; the other is our DRBD drives. Once we configure DRBD with GFS2 we have our replacement SAN.
I prefer to dedicate one drive completely to the operating system for I/O performance. I use the latest release of Fedora Linux but any distribution should be fine.
For the virtualization hypervisor I use libvirt with KVM which will completely replace xen eventually.
Once familiar with this kind of configuration you can easily take one node offline to upgrade additional storage or any hardware requirements without users suffering.
If you would like us to build you one of these clusters please send us an email enquiry sales@testlabs.com.au.
We provide you with a full working manual, disaster recovery assistance, and remote management as necessaries.
Video coming Soon…
Regards,
Testlabs Team