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About LinkBacksDo you actually get some kind of official Ubuntu documentation for KVM or Xen? When I've looked I've only ever found community based documentation that tends to be sparse and out-of-date.Originally Posted by glennda
Do you actually get some kind of official Ubuntu documentation for KVM or Xen? When I've looked I've only ever found community based documentation that tends to be sparse and out-of-date.
The Redhat docs for KVM are here.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Based on that I'd be more tempted to have a go with CentOS, or do they reserve some of this software for people that are paying them?
The KVM stuff is all free and built into linux.
I'm not really sure how much of RHEV 3 is 'free' presumably you can download it like you can with JBOSS. I've not found link so am thinking it is a 'package' that redhat sell unless you build from source.
I use Community docs - most of it makes sense but sometimes you have to combine various resources to get something working correctly. But trust it fully everything sits atop - exchange, DC's, sims the lot
Do you have any issues with Ubuntu package updates? Personally I would feel happier using Debian because you know things aren't going to get changed other than fixing things and security for 2 or 3 years. I've heard a few people say that Ubuntu updates are a little more "dynamic".
No only run servers on LTS Versions currently 10.04 and update every 6 months. We do heavy googling before updating to make sure there are no problems. Been running this for just over 2 years now. Started with 8.04 and moved up to 10.04. Will probably go 12.04 sometime in August. We don't run any gui's on the servers therefore this reduces the updates which come down significantly.
Sorry for Hijacking the thread!
in centos you install the virtual server tools package upon installation and do a yum update when you boot into centos, or just add the package manually and do a kernel update.
We are currently looking and costing the same as you @timbo343. We have decided on 2 hosts and a SAN and will be going towards Xen - plenty of advice on here for that. We are looking at the middle license which does cost money but adds some extra bits to the free version (we are still discussing this).
In addition we are going to budget for a kick-ass UPS to power all of this. (Still researching).
We are going to do this ourselves and with questions asked of Google and Edugeekers. We are not sure what to do - but have setup a little test network of two machines in a cluster to trial. We are currently running the trial and it seems to be okay.
The main issue is we have no idea if we are doing this right. Are we wasting money? Are we going to be okay for the next few years? We are replacing 7 servers (hangover from RM days and 4DCs) and moving them onto two servers. We will be moving a printer server (pCounter), an SME server and a few other bits.
We don't have a DC onsite - there are central DCs in the LEA - however due to the outage issues in Swansea LEA last week we feel that a DC on site would help. Can this be virtualised? I've heard/read on Google that DCs should not be virtualised, however as this isn't a 'main' DC I got the impression that it didn't matter. It's the one main DC that shouldn't be converted. What are the opinions on this?
Many thanks
Gareth
DC's not virtualized ?? Never heard of this it makes no difference in fact I'd recommend you do!!!! For a start it means if need be you can move VM's from Server to server if you needed to do an upgrade etc etc - Our DC's and Exchange servers are all virtualized ..... I wouldnt recommend otherwise and definitely have one on site!
Another big thumbs up for Xenserver here, running 3 hosts (pooled) with HA for the cost of £1200 (£400 per host for the HA license) attached to Sun 7110 for VM's running 12 servers load balanced between the three.
I wouldn't virtualise my DC not until I had a proper system in place to bring to take them down and back up again in the proper order if ever a power cut ensued. I haven't got round to this yet but will do when I have the time and the money.
Installation is fairly simple just download the ISO image burn it to disk and then boot from disk and follow the instructions.
The SAN and 2 nics of the hosts are on a different IP range running through 2 gig switches to allow for failover the other 2 nics are load balanced and belong to the network LAN so no bandwidth issues as data just flows back and forwards from the XEN hosts to the SAN.
Has worked very well for over a year in fact thats how long they have been up for hehe!
I have not updated from version 5.6 sp2 yet to version 6 as it has a couple of issues at the moment.
Very happy at the moment.
cpjitservices (29th February 2012)
XenServer 6 High Availability will let you choose the restart order of VMs with an optional time delay.
@morganw:
Version 5.6 also
I think I went from 5.6 SP1 to 6 and then found I had it, so must have been in SP2.
edit: ...or maybe it was FP1. It's a strange release naming convention they use.
Last edited by morganw; 29th February 2012 at 10:36 PM.
I've found the resources available for Xen (the open source version, not XenServer) running on Debian (rather than Ubuntu) to be fine. Regarding virtualising domain controllers: the issue is with people taking and then restoring snapshots of domain controllers, which confuses them somewhat. It's best to have two domain controllers in your organisation (both can be VMs) and let them replicate between themselves using their own mechanism, or use Windows backup, rather than trying to back them up using a snapshot.
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