[geeks] "Cloud" craziness...

[velociraptor]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:00 PM, Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at zill.net> wrote:
> On 4/3/2012 1:25 PM, Jonathan Katz wrote:
>> Hey everyone!
>>
>> Let's say I have a half-dozen virtual machines which I want to throw
>> "in the cloud" so a team of folks spread across the globe can work on
>> a few different programs which require individual OS instances. Having
>> the hosting party worry about DR, backups, and availability would be
>> nice.
>>
>> Each OS/VM will likely be CentOS based.
>>
>> What providers/bang for the buck, do you suggest? Joyent? Rackspace?
>>
>> Alternately we're looking at co-locating a 2U box we'd own, but we'd
>> like to avoid the headache of managing our own DR and worrying about
>> bad disks.
>>
> There are a lot of different ways to do it.
>
> Given my experience with OpenVZ running Linux VMs, I would suggest you
> look into using OpenVZ instead - actually, Proxmox.com's bundling of
> OpenVZ along with a nice little Web GUI is pretty handy.  OpenVZ is
> hands-down the most resource-friendly way to run a bunch of Linux VMs
> (IMHO).
>
> Plenty of providers offer colo + backup space.  You might find though
> that the easiest option is to colo 2 boxes, and back the one up to the
> other.
>
> You don't mention how available you need to be.
>
> If you want something fancier, you need at least 3 servers plus the
> ability to shutdown each system, either with IPMI or an
> Ethernet-connected power strip.  In this case, you have a quorum of 2
> server that decide the other one is bad, the bad one gets turned off and
> the VMs are booted off of shared storage on a second hardware node.
>
> If your budget is low and 1 hour or so of downtime is acceptable, simply
> colo 2 boxes, use RAID1 on all drives, and use DRBD to continuously
> replicate changes from server A to server B. If server A gives problems,
> start the VMs on server B.  Of course, you will need good backups, but
> you should be well-connected enough to do offsite backups nightly.

You can automate managing your own little "cloud" with Xen or KVM if
you wrap it all up with Ganeti, a tool that Google uses in house.
http://code.google.com/p/ganeti/

Does live migration, DRBD, etc.  Extensively tested on Debian and
Ubuntu, but supposedly runs on CentOS and others as well.

=Nadine=