Linux "micro-cloud"

[markw-4]

I have a couple servers in a cambridge colocation, they are rapidly
approaching 10 years old. Needless to say, its time to upgrade.

I currently have 2 dual PIII 800 MHZ each with a gig of ram. I am looking
to replace them with two quad-core AMD AthlonII with 8 gigs of ram. (Total
cost for both motherboads, memory and CPU is $600!!! unbelievable!)

I think I want to set it up a small cloud system. Rather than setup two
machines, one as a database server and the other as a mass-web host, (like
I currently have) I think I want to be more creative.

Keep one as a raw machine that runs the databases, as disk I/O is dog slow
on virtualized hardware, and on the other make it a host a host machine on
which I'll run a one or more virtual machines doing the web and service
hosting. (If there is enough bandwidth, I may run VMs on the database
machine as well)

The the thing I want to discuss...

Are there any "good" vm tools out there that makes this easy. I'm using
VMPlayer and not sure I want to use it. I'd like a command line text
system as these will be remote servers and a GUI is painful remotely.

Any ideas? Suggestions?

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[jay-118]

One thing to keep in mind is that the athlon has no L3 cache, which could impact vm preformance.  I was recently considering similar hardware, but in the end ended up going with a single quad core xeon x3430 (the new "i5 xeon") as opposed to the athlons.  Along with a supermicro board and 8gig of ecc for around 600. Also the pheonom II X4 is the athlon II X4 with 6mb of L3, but at a $50 permium.

I'm thinking in your application more processors will be more valuable, due to the large number of vms.  My use was half a dozen desktop and general servers. But you'll want to consult some one with more expertise on vps hosting and database cache use.  

------Original Message------
From: markw@...
Sender: discuss-bounces@...
To: BLU
Subject: Linux "micro-cloud"
Sent: Nov 5, 2009 9:54 AM

I have a couple servers in a cambridge colocation, they are rapidly
approaching 10 years old. Needless to say, its time to upgrade.

I currently have 2 dual PIII 800 MHZ each with a gig of ram. I am looking
to replace them with two quad-core AMD AthlonII with 8 gigs of ram. (Total
cost for both motherboads, memory and CPU is $600!!! unbelievable!)

I think I want to set it up a small cloud system. Rather than setup two
machines, one as a database server and the other as a mass-web host, (like
I currently have) I think I want to be more creative.

Keep one as a raw machine that runs the databases, as disk I/O is dog slow
on virtualized hardware, and on the other make it a host a host machine on
which I'll run a one or more virtual machines doing the web and service
hosting. (If there is enough bandwidth, I may run VMs on the database
machine as well)

The the thing I want to discuss...

Are there any "good" vm tools out there that makes this easy. I'm using
VMPlayer and not sure I want to use it. I'd like a command line text
system as these will be remote servers and a GUI is painful remotely.

Any ideas? Suggestions?

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[Matt Shields-4]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 9:54 AM, <markw@...> wrote:

> I have a couple servers in a cambridge colocation, they are rapidly
> approaching 10 years old. Needless to say, its time to upgrade.
>
> I currently have 2 dual PIII 800 MHZ each with a gig of ram. I am looking
> to replace them with two quad-core AMD AthlonII with 8 gigs of ram. (Total
> cost for both motherboads, memory and CPU is $600!!! unbelievable!)
>
> I think I want to set it up a small cloud system. Rather than setup two
> machines, one as a database server and the other as a mass-web host, (like
> I currently have) I think I want to be more creative.
>
> Keep one as a raw machine that runs the databases, as disk I/O is dog slow
> on virtualized hardware, and on the other make it a host a host machine on
> which I'll run a one or more virtual machines doing the web and service
> hosting. (If there is enough bandwidth, I may run VMs on the database
> machine as well)
>
> The the thing I want to discuss...
>
> Are there any "good" vm tools out there that makes this easy. I'm using
> VMPlayer and not sure I want to use it. I'd like a command line text
> system as these will be remote servers and a GUI is painful remotely.
>
> Any ideas? Suggestions?
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss@...
> http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>

Recently I was looking to replace an aging VMWare Infrastructure 2 cluster
(20 servers) with something new.  I checked out all the different products
out there.  New VMWare products are too high priced.  Their products are
great, but I couldn't justify the extremely high cost.

If you're looking at Xen or KVM, check out Enomaly/Enomalism (
http://enomalism.com/) and Open Symbolic (http://www.opensymbolic.org/).
They look like great products, they have great demos, but I had a tough time
getting them to actually work and control my Xen systems.  The Enomaly
maillist has tons of people who have successfully installed it, but there
are more people that complain that they can't get it working.  The Open
Symbolic system seems great because it also ties together Cobbler
(provisioning), Puppet (config management) and func all together, but even
when I offer to buy a support contract from them it took about 3 weeks for
them to get back to me, and even with them logged into my test environment
they couldn't get their own product to work.

So I opted to look at Citirix XenSource.  If you're looking for live
balancing of VM's across your cluster you can buy their commercial version
(Essential Tools), or if you just want to manage a number of individuals Xen
boxes they have the free XenServer and XenCenter. If you have a backend SAN,
NFS, iSCSI you can use that across all your boxes and do live migrations, it
just won't auto balance the load unless you buy the commercial package.

-matt
http://www.sysadminvalley.com
http://www.beantownhost.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/mattboston
Mike Ditka <http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/mike_ditka.html>  -
"If God had wanted man to play soccer, he wouldn't have given us arms."
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[jay-118]

One other suggestion I can add is to look into opensolaris with xVM (xen).  you can manage xen how ever you like, including directly on the command line, or with add on tools.  But a big advantage of solaris is ZFS and how incredibly easy it is to manage drive space and configuration from a command line.   This includes features like disk quotas, iscsi volumes, data integrity checks and they are just introducing block level deduplication (not in production release yet), that should have a big impact on multi vps boxes.

Again I'm no expert but if you want to get your hands dirty and use a free and open solution, its seems quite promising.
 
------Original Message------
From: markw@...
Sender: discuss-bounces@...
To: BLU
Subject: Linux "micro-cloud"
Sent: Nov 5, 2009 9:54 AM

I have a couple servers in a cambridge colocation, they are rapidly
approaching 10 years old. Needless to say, its time to upgrade.

I currently have 2 dual PIII 800 MHZ each with a gig of ram. I am looking
to replace them with two quad-core AMD AthlonII with 8 gigs of ram. (Total
cost for both motherboads, memory and CPU is $600!!! unbelievable!)

I think I want to set it up a small cloud system. Rather than setup two
machines, one as a database server and the other as a mass-web host, (like
I currently have) I think I want to be more creative.

Keep one as a raw machine that runs the databases, as disk I/O is dog slow
on virtualized hardware, and on the other make it a host a host machine on
which I'll run a one or more virtual machines doing the web and service
hosting. (If there is enough bandwidth, I may run VMs on the database
machine as well)

The the thing I want to discuss...

Are there any "good" vm tools out there that makes this easy. I'm using
VMPlayer and not sure I want to use it. I'd like a command line text
system as these will be remote servers and a GUI is painful remotely.

Any ideas? Suggestions?

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Discuss mailing list
Discuss@...
http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss



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[Richard Pieri]

On Nov 5, 2009, at 9:54 AM, markw@... wrote:
> which I'll run a one or more virtual machines doing the web and  
> service
> hosting. (If there is enough bandwidth, I may run VMs on the database
> machine as well)

Not a silly question: why?  On the face of it this doesn't seem like  
virtualization is a good solution.  If your database engine scales  
with cores then virtualizing that is a losing proposition, and web  
farms are usually better handled as 1U rack mounts than virtualized on  
large hardware.

Just food for thought.

--Rich P.

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[markw-4]

> From: Richard Pieri <richard.pieri@...>
> Subject: Re: Linux "micro-cloud"
> To: "Boston Lunix User's Group" <discuss@...>
> Message-ID: <385FD15A-4E21-4A07-AA9F-7E1732AB5CDE@...>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed; delsp=yes
>
> On Nov 5, 2009, at 9:54 AM, markw@... wrote:
>> which I'll run a one or more virtual machines doing the web and
>> service
>> hosting. (If there is enough bandwidth, I may run VMs on the database
>> machine as well)
>
> Not a silly question: why?  On the face of it this doesn't seem like
> virtualization is a good solution.  If your database engine scales
> with cores then virtualizing that is a losing proposition, and web
> farms are usually better handled as 1U rack mounts than virtualized on
> large hardware.
>
> Just food for thought.
>
> --Rich P.

Actually, I held that opinion not so long ago, but I have re-evaluated
much of it.

For a database system, absolutely, as close as possible to the hardware is
the absolute for performance, I have no argument. Second, for merely
performance reasons, one should never choose a VM because it does, in
fact, add an amount of overhead to normal functionality.


My current system is slower than it should be. Not to say it is
overloaded, just some functions take to long because of raw CPU
bottleneck. So faster+more CPU is a better solution. Faster CPU for single
thread performance, more CPUs for multiple processors. Once upgraded I
will have CPU and RAM to spare.

Now, I currently have over 40 web sites hosted on the machine, all small
little sites. I don't make much on them. With virtualization, I will be
able to sell whole "machines" much like Amazon AWS.

I will be able to construct/deploy different "machines" "on the fly" for
various purposes. I will be able to map them to their own IP address,
their own config, their own OS. I could even run a Windows VM on my Linux
system if I needed a Windows only service!

The possibilities are very cool.
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[Richard Pieri]

On Nov 6, 2009, at 1:52 PM, markw@... wrote:
> Now, I currently have over 40 web sites hosted on the machine, all  
> small
> little sites. I don't make much on them. With virtualization, I will  
> be
> able to sell whole "machines" much like Amazon AWS.

A-hah! It's web *hosting*, not web *farm*.  That's different, and  
wasn't clear to me from the original posting.  In a hosting  
environment, where you "stack" non-identical servers, virtualization  
can be a win.

--Rich P.

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