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RE: [Xen-users] Distributed xen or cluster?

To: "xen-users" <xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [Xen-users] Distributed xen or cluster?
From: christoffer@xxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 10:17:10 +0100 (CET)
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Mike,

You might want to check out the many management frontends to Xen. I'm
using the simplest one (I believe), ConVirt (formerly XenMan), for
instance. When I once issued a shutdown on dom0 without first shutting
down my (only) VM, its status changed to "migrating". Now, there was
nowhere to migrate to, but at least it tried. I think you can find various
levels of sophistication in the frontends, some requiring SAN
infrastructure, providing automatic deployment, power management,
migration and some much simpler. Maybe you can find something that's right
for you, especially if you can live with a minute or two of downtime in
the event of hw failure. Migration won't help you then, but a quick or
even automatic deploy will. You can find some links to various projects on
the xen.org web page.

We are using VMware ESX at work and if I understand correctly, Xen can do
the same things. I can say that our ability to quickly deploy and move
around live servers has drastically changed the uptime for our Windows
servers, far beyond any complicated clusters we've put up previously. And
it can be managed by our 24x7 operators. Our Sun/Unix guys who haven't yet
managed to virtualize, live in danger of becoming extinct.

Cheers,
/Chris

>> You are expecting to make "an instance of a vm" fault tolerant. I
>> haven't
>> seen that, but I have seen storage fault tolerant as people have stated.
>> So you
>
> Well, so far, I've been talking about the entire operating system but from
> all of the conversation, it's not looking feasible, at least at this time.
>
>> you need to handle this at the application level. Such as fault tolerant
>> service's running on two xen servers with their each own vm.
>
> You're absolutely correct of course and that's always the first way to
> handle this. I was asking for leads, input, ideas, maybe something would
> have come up. Since I'm no developer myself, I'll take a look at the leads
> sent to me but as you say, for now, I'll simply try to handle things as I
> always have, with application redundancy.
>
> Mike
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Xen-users mailing list
> Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users
>



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