Posted: 8/15/2012 12:41:55 PM EDT
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we have a pretty fair cluster of vsphere at work... about 30 hosts and probalby 200 guests inside. its all enterprise licenesed, and the short version of the long story is the advnatage is the vmotion that moves guests from host to host as you take them down for upgrades and such.
i do have a esxi 5.0 server at home, which is the free version of hte above, but wihtout clustering. so my guest machines are stuck where they are. anyone use linux kvm in some sort of clustered setup? i am wondering what the performance comparision between esxi and kvm is. anyone have experience with kvm? |
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No experience with KVM but I built from scratch the infrastructure at my old job. 20 hosts total, only 250 VMs but we used SRM for failover for DR so 4 hosts were for our DR site. Originally installed ESX 4, upgraded to ESXi 4.1 and then to 5.0 back in November. Put in a Cisco UCS as well. Sweet ass system.
New job we have maybe 60-70 hosts and over 4000 VMs. 3.5 to ESXi 4.1. We have the hardware to build a new 24 host cluster on 5.0 but haven't had the time to actually start building it. Due to the nature of our business they decided to take the route of building a new cluster with a new vSphere 5 server instead of upgrading the old and just migrating stuff over. If you have a machine that will run it, check this site out. http://www.labguides.com/autolab/ I have two ESXi 5 VMs running in VMware Workstation 8 and some stuff running on the VMs. Haven't gotten to play around with it much yet but it's a pretty slick setup the guy came up with for testing and practice purposes. |
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VCP here... back on ESX 3, and I've been out of that game for a while. Worked primarily on Windows, now I've been back into Linux for the last couple years and don't get into the virtualization much anymore.
I wouldn't expect that there's all that much difference between ESXi and kvm, but I have no experience with the latter. |
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Quoted: we have a pretty fair cluster of vsphere at work... about 30 hosts and probably 200 guests inside. its all enterprise licensed, and the short version of the long story is the advantage is the vmotion that moves guests from host to host as you take them down for upgrades and such. i do have a esxi 5.0 server at home, which is the free version of the above, but without clustering. so my guest machines are stuck where they are. anyone use linux kvm in some sort of clustered setup? i am wondering what the performance comparison between esxi and kvm is. anyone have experience with kvm? I am not understanding fully what the issue is. VMotion makes it much easier to move VMs, but you can still move VMs with the free version. It sounds like you are trying to over complicate the situation with wanting to go to another hypervisor, unless you are specifically looking to cluster with a free version. The best way to move a VMware VM is to shutdown the VM and then copy the files such as flat.vmdk, vmdk, vmx, log files and vmxf files to the new computer or storage device. You can then re add the VM to a new host or to the same host. The poor mans VMotionish would be to take a snapshot, copy those files over, add the VM to inventory on the host. Edit the vmdk file to remove the snapshot, disable the nic on new copy of VM, start the VM to make sure it works, add tools or make changes, shutdown VM enable the nic, shutdown the old copy of VM then start new copy. I have done this several time. As you are looking to do this at home, I assume you only have a handful of guests and if you need to move them, this would be easier then converting guests to ZEN or similar. Also, there will have some downtime, but usually if you have something at home, some downtime will be inevitable because most people use the free versions. How many host machines and how many guest do you have? From the sound of your post you only have one host. Are you trying to move the guests to a new storage server or a new host? How many guests do you want to move? A better detail of your setup and what you are trying to accomplish will help, again unless you are specifically trying to cluster and not just move the guests every once in a while. If you have any questions or need more in depth help, just ask. I am also assuming you are familiar with ssh and at least linux commands. |
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we have a pretty fair cluster of vsphere at work... about 30 hosts and probably 200 guests inside. its all enterprise licensed, and the short version of the long story is the advantage is the vmotion that moves guests from host to host as you take them down for upgrades and such. i do have a esxi 5.0 server at home, which is the free version of the above, but without clustering. so my guest machines are stuck where they are. anyone use linux kvm in some sort of clustered setup? i am wondering what the performance comparison between esxi and kvm is. anyone have experience with kvm? I am not understanding fully what the issue is. VMotion makes it much easier to move VMs, but you can still move VMs with the free version. It sounds like you are trying to over complicate the situation with wanting to go to another hypervisor, unless you are specifically looking to cluster with a free version. The best way to move a VMware VM is to shutdown the VM and then copy the files such as flat.vmdk, vmdk, vmx, log files and vmxf files to the new computer or storage device. You can then re add the VM to a new host or to the same host. The poor mans VMotionish would be to take a snapshot, copy those files over, add the VM to inventory on the host. Edit the vmdk file to remove the snapshot, disable the nic on new copy of VM, start the VM to make sure it works, add tools or make changes, shutdown VM enable the nic, shutdown the old copy of VM then start new copy. I have done this several time. As you are looking to do this at home, I assume you only have a handful of guests and if you need to move them, this would be easier then converting guests to ZEN or similar. Also, there will have some downtime, but usually if you have something at home, some downtime will be inevitable because most people use the free versions. How many host machines and how many guest do you have? From the sound of your post you only have one host. Are you trying to move the guests to a new storage server or a new host? How many guests do you want to move? A better detail of your setup and what you are trying to accomplish will help, again unless you are specifically trying to cluster and not just move the guests every once in a while. If you have any questions or need more in depth help, just ask. I am also assuming you are familiar with ssh and at least linux commands. Don't underestimate the convenience and power of VMotion. In a production enterprise environment, VMotion is TITS. With the dynamic resource allocation, the environment can move VMs around automatically WHILE THEY ARE RUNNING if resource utilization demands it. Hardware upgrades are also easy as pie, because you can just put a host in maintenance mode, and all of the VMs will VMotion off of it automatically, again, WHILE THEY ARE RUNNING. Sure, you may not need that in a test or development environment, but it's one feature that other hypervisors can't really do yet. |
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we have a pretty fair cluster of vsphere at work... about 30 hosts and probably 200 guests inside. its all enterprise licensed, and the short version of the long story is the advantage is the vmotion that moves guests from host to host as you take them down for upgrades and such. i do have a esxi 5.0 server at home, which is the free version of the above, but without clustering. so my guest machines are stuck where they are. anyone use linux kvm in some sort of clustered setup? i am wondering what the performance comparison between esxi and kvm is. anyone have experience with kvm? I am not understanding fully what the issue is. VMotion makes it much easier to move VMs, but you can still move VMs with the free version. It sounds like you are trying to over complicate the situation with wanting to go to another hypervisor, unless you are specifically looking to cluster with a free version. The best way to move a VMware VM is to shutdown the VM and then copy the files such as flat.vmdk, vmdk, vmx, log files and vmxf files to the new computer or storage device. You can then re add the VM to a new host or to the same host. The poor mans VMotionish would be to take a snapshot, copy those files over, add the VM to inventory on the host. Edit the vmdk file to remove the snapshot, disable the nic on new copy of VM, start the VM to make sure it works, add tools or make changes, shutdown VM enable the nic, shutdown the old copy of VM then start new copy. I have done this several time. As you are looking to do this at home, I assume you only have a handful of guests and if you need to move them, this would be easier then converting guests to ZEN or similar. Also, there will have some downtime, but usually if you have something at home, some downtime will be inevitable because most people use the free versions. How many host machines and how many guest do you have? From the sound of your post you only have one host. Are you trying to move the guests to a new storage server or a new host? How many guests do you want to move? A better detail of your setup and what you are trying to accomplish will help, again unless you are specifically trying to cluster and not just move the guests every once in a while. If you have any questions or need more in depth help, just ask. I am also assuming you are familiar with ssh and at least linux commands. Don't underestimate the convenience and power of VMotion. In a production enterprise environment, VMotion is TITS. With the dynamic resource allocation, the environment can move VMs around automatically WHILE THEY ARE RUNNING if resource utilization demands it. Hardware upgrades are also easy as pie, because you can just put a host in maintenance mode, and all of the VMs will VMotion off of it automatically, again, WHILE THEY ARE RUNNING. Sure, you may not need that in a test or development environment, but it's one feature that other hypervisors can't really do yet. Even cooler when you have Metro VMotion setup. 
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Quoted: Quoted: Quoted: we have a pretty fair cluster of vsphere at work... about 30 hosts and probably 200 guests inside. its all enterprise licensed, and the short version of the long story is the advantage is the vmotion that moves guests from host to host as you take them down for upgrades and such. i do have a esxi 5.0 server at home, which is the free version of the above, but without clustering. so my guest machines are stuck where they are. anyone use linux kvm in some sort of clustered setup? i am wondering what the performance comparison between esxi and kvm is. anyone have experience with kvm? I am not understanding fully what the issue is. VMotion makes it much easier to move VMs, but you can still move VMs with the free version. It sounds like you are trying to over complicate the situation with wanting to go to another hypervisor, unless you are specifically looking to cluster with a free version. The best way to move a VMware VM is to shutdown the VM and then copy the files such as flat.vmdk, vmdk, vmx, log files and vmxf files to the new computer or storage device. You can then re add the VM to a new host or to the same host. The poor mans VMotionish would be to take a snapshot, copy those files over, add the VM to inventory on the host. Edit the vmdk file to remove the snapshot, disable the nic on new copy of VM, start the VM to make sure it works, add tools or make changes, shutdown VM enable the nic, shutdown the old copy of VM then start new copy. I have done this several time. As you are looking to do this at home, I assume you only have a handful of guests and if you need to move them, this would be easier then converting guests to ZEN or similar. Also, there will have some downtime, but usually if you have something at home, some downtime will be inevitable because most people use the free versions. How many host machines and how many guest do you have? From the sound of your post you only have one host. Are you trying to move the guests to a new storage server or a new host? How many guests do you want to move? A better detail of your setup and what you are trying to accomplish will help, again unless you are specifically trying to cluster and not just move the guests every once in a while. If you have any questions or need more in depth help, just ask. I am also assuming you are familiar with ssh and at least linux commands. Don't underestimate the convenience and power of VMotion. In a production enterprise environment, VMotion is TITS. With the dynamic resource allocation, the environment can move VMs around automatically WHILE THEY ARE RUNNING if resource utilization demands it. Hardware upgrades are also easy as pie, because you can just put a host in maintenance mode, and all of the VMs will VMotion off of it automatically, again, WHILE THEY ARE RUNNING. Sure, you may not need that in a test or development environment, but it's one feature that other hypervisors can't really do yet. I think you missed the point of the OPs post. Read the highlighted portion above. I know what VMotion can do and I was trying to point out and help the OP on moving VMs around in his ESXi environment on his home server which does not have VMotion, unless I misread what the OP thought he couldn't do. My post was to give a basic guide to the OP to walk him through moving his VMs on the free version instead of converting them and having to create a new host environment, which would probably take much longer then moving them. I also asked some questions to get more feedback to help the OP. Unless he is running critical VMs that can't come down even for a few minutes, then I was trying to point out that he can move VMs around in ESXi. He may only have experience with VMotion and does not know how to move VMs without a point and click utility to move the VMs. If the OP is running such a critical operation at home that he can't shutdown the VMs for an hour or two, then that presents problems in and of itself, but I suspect not as the VMs may have to come down to get converted to a new environment anyways. |
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I run a couple of vSphere ESXi clusters at work. We are also starting to look at OpenStack to build our own cloud, using the KVM hypervisor. The biggest conceptual difference between ESXi and KVM is that ESXi installs on bare metal, while KVM requires Linux to run on top of. IMHO, OpenStack isn't nearly as mature or as easily usable as vSphere + vCenter. If you want to try out OpenStack, are couple easy ways to get it running are Devstack and Rackspace's Private Cloud installer. The OpenStack community seems to centered on using Ubuntu Server as the OS of choice. You can get it running on RHEL or CentOS, but it's a lot more work.
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If you want to save money on hardware/software for shared storage then take a look at this: http://napp-it.org/ It's a ZFS/OpenIndiana implantation with a web front end. They have an install guide where you run the NFS server inside of a VM to serve up an NFS datastore to VMware. I'm actually getting ready to run one of these setups for our PHD Virtual backup appliances since we need a lot of space, but we don't need enterprise level iSCSI or NFS performance. I should do a writeup on the process and overall performance of our backups. Going to $115 2TB drives is much better than $300 1TB enterprise drives for bulk backup space. At the end of the year I want to upgrade the RAID card to something that supports 3-4TB drives so we can then take advantage of those. Overall I am spending about $1400 for a server, RAID card, JBOD chassis, and 7 2TB drives. And here's some cheap hardware to get that going: http://www.unixsurplus.com/product/rackable-3u-16-bays-sata-sas-expander-w-lsi-8888elp-raid-card If you have the hardware to do VT-d passthrough of the RAID card then you are golden. They have an eBay store and you can usually get the products much less with the "make offer" button. I just picked up this with a dual Opteron 16GB server for $510 shipped just to see what we can do with it.
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