Hi i've been using multiple types of VM solutions like xenserver, vmware, proxmox etc etc .. though i was wondering what your favorite type is and why .. Please take things like clustering/backup/management/costs and last but certainly not least (automatic) failover in consideration. thanks!
Hi Mark, I use XEN on production servers and Virtualbox on the desktop. I like XEN, because it's very stable, has a nice performance and it's free. There is a lot of documentation available as well. Easy backup solutions are possible with XEN. Xen runs very well on the (own) Dell servers i have. Virtual box is very easy to use and the performance is quiet good. I don't have much experience with other VM solutions, but i've heard positive things about them as well.
He Hans, thanks for your reply Well i've been using xen as well for some time, and i still have some server pairs running it's (mostly our ispconfig instances), though i don't trust heartbeat for the failover .. i've been playing with corosync as well for that, it works much better, but still i rather do migrations manual unless i find a stable trustworthy solution for that. What kind of backup do you use with Xen (without downtime)? And i use vBox on my desktop as well, perfect to run a windowsXP for crappy tools that aren't available for linux I've put a proxmox cluster of 2 into action, and i've to say it's pretty nice .. did extensive testing on it and worked just fine, and ofcourse when you take it into production, it decided to crash while making backups (with lvm snapshots) (no data loss btw), so i don't trust that anymore as well ... back up manual backups! *sigh*
Hi Mark, In the past i did some tests with dbrd and heartbeat as well, but i don't trust it. And if something goes wrong, it seems a beast to repair it. The servers i use have hardware RAID1. I've used CloneZilla to backup the host itself and this script for backing up the XEN-domains. It's capable to make LVM-snapshots as well. On the backup server itself, RSyncbackup is used to copy everything to another backup server with a retention of 7 days.
Hehe crash recovery of a DRBD setup is a pain, been there done that ;-) Have a look at pacemaker http://www.clusterlabs.org/ .. i like this alot more then just hb. I'll have a look into that xenbackup script .. as i understand it can make live backups without downtime, how is the performance of the VM itself during the backup? I use clonezilla for our deployment of new installations (in combination of DRBL) .. we've webservers, red5, mysql, fcs etc machines .. making an image for each type of server just simplifies deployment of a new os+ it's software ..
Interesting and yes, CloneZilla is great! I really do have a positive experience with the script and it's the reason i use it for production. Of course i make the backups at night, however I have a lot of clients at the other side of the globe, but the performance is still good. Maybe i don't have a cluster, but after a crash, i am able to restore everything in an understandable way with minimal downtime.
Performance-wise, OpenVZ is great. The only problem is to set the right limits for your VM so that it doesn't stop working, but on this area, vzsplit can be of help: http://www.howtoforge.com/splitting-resources-evenly-between-openvz-vms-with-vzsplit
