Chuck wrote:
>we are completely restructuring our entire physical network around the vserver
>concept.
>
>it has proven itself in stability and performance in production to the point
>we no longer see the need for dedicated servers except in the most demanding
>instances (mostly our email server which cannot be run as a guest until there
>is no slow down using > 130 ip addresses).
>
>in our network restructuring, we wish to use our large storage nfs system and
>place all the vserver guests on that sharing those directories to be mounted
>on the proper dual opteron machine front end as /vservers.
>
>i am seriously thinking of also making /etc/vservers an nfs mount so that each
>host configuration and guests live in a particular area on the nfs to make
>switching machines a breeze if so needed.
>
>does anyone see a problem with this idea? we will be using dual GB nics into
>this nfs system in a pvtnet from each machine to facilitate large amounts of
>data flow. public ip space will still use 100mb nics.
>
>if this can work efficiently (most of our guests are not disk i/o bound..
>those with ultra heavy disk i/o will live on each front end machine), we can
>consolidate more than 100 machines into 2 front end machines and one SAN
>system. This would free enough rack space that if we don't need any dedicated
>machines in the future we could easily add more than 1500 servers in
>host/guest config in the same space 100 took up. it would also hugely
>simplify backups and drop our electric bill in half or more.
>
>
Nice idea, certainly NFS is right for /etc/vservers, but consider using
a network block device, like iSCSI or ATA over Ethernet for the
filesystems used by vservers themselves. You'll save yourself a lot of
headaches and the thing will probably run a *lot* faster. Unification
would be impractical on top of all of this, but this is probably not a
huge problem.
Sam.
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Received on Wed Apr 26 08:00:59 2006