Xenserver virtualisation - Open source do you use it?

[tj2419]

Just wondering if anyone uses xenserver open source server virtualisation for production servers? We are looking at setting up a new vle and want to get to grips more with virtualisation and thought it might be an ideal way.

 

Would you use it for a school production server (Moodle). Cheers

[MrLudwig]

I've used it in the past (probably a few versions ago now). Had it running virtual servers hosting Sophos, WSUS, SQL Server plus a few ASP based IIS sites internally. Never had any problems with it although I didn't use many features above the basic virtualisation stuff. At the time I seem to remember trying it as the hardware I was using wasn't supported by ESXi.

[bossman]

Been using it for 4 years now with HA and scheduled snapshots to backup storage, 3 hosts in server pool, never missed a beat, on version 6.0.2 and its very stable.

 

VMs include MIS Sims server, we have 12 mixed servers (Windows and Linux) running off 3 hosts and it is only the fact that the hosts RAM support is limited to 32Gb that we don't yet have all the servers virtualised but that will come shortly.

 

What can I say except it has cost us just £1200 for license which supports HA.

 

Try it for free you only have to purchase the advanced license for certain tools, nothing to lose.

[dhicks]

Try it for free you only have to purchase the advanced license for certain tools

 

Not any more, you don't - as from 6.2.0 XenServer is fully open source, with all features now free. We've been using XenServer for the past three years or so here, and I used Xen-on-Linux at home and at my previous school for around three years before that. Everything runs just fine - domain controller, file server, Exchange server, SQL Server 2012, etc.

 

For a VM to run Moodle, XenServer should be able to use a paravirtulised Linux kernel - a Linux kernel compiled with Xen-specific extensions so that it knows it is running as a VM and can run more efficiently. I think you can now over-commit RAM and move running VMs between local storage on separate servers, too.

 

I'm hopefully getting out current configuration sorted out here this half term - I have some VMs to move from shared iSCSI storage to local storage, then I have backups and so forth to sort out.

[FragglePete]

I've got it running on three machines here hosting 12 virtual servers in total. Started using it 5 years ago with XenServer 5.5 and it's been rock solid. It was our first dip into Virtualisation. All local storage with the first having to add a DAS unit to increase capacity a couple of years back. As of right now, each has an uptime of 800 days, 22 hours and 17 minutes - I'm aiming for the 1000 day mark!

 

I'm looking to replace the first one now as it's coming up to 5 years old so wanting to put something newer in place. We haven't got HA so have kept with the free version but it's been great. We run Print Server, Home Directory File Server, SIMS, Finance Server, etc quite happily.

 

Pete

[IrritableTech]

Much the same story here as @FragglePete.

 

Installed nearly four years ago using 5.6. We have three servers in our pool. We recently upgraded the ram in them to host more VMs.

 

They run the whole school infrastructure except for backups and our fog server. We've never paid citrix any money, so haven't had HA. We've now got a dozen virtual servers running over the three physical connected to a SAN and a NAS over iSCSI. The system is designed so that two physical servers can host all VMs, which allowed us to increase the RAM during the normal school day without anyone noticing. The whole thing was designed, installed and commissioned in house.

[CyberNerd]

You can get the full HA using ovirt to manage your XEN. No limits or restrictions.

oVirt

We use it with KVM (instead of XEN) and get cheap support from RedHat.

Red Hat | Enterprise Virtualization for servers and desktops

[FragglePete]

Much the same story here as @FragglePete.

 

Installed nearly four years ago using 5.6. We have three servers in our pool. We recently upgraded the ram in them to host more VMs.

 

They run the whole school infrastructure except for backups and our fog server. We've never paid citrix any money, so haven't had HA. We've now got a dozen virtual servers running over the three physical connected to a SAN and a NAS over iSCSI. The system is designed so that two physical servers can host all VMs, which allowed us to increase the RAM during the normal school day without anyone noticing. The whole thing was designed, installed and commissioned in house.

 

What SAN / NAS units do you use @IrritableTech ? I'm looking to replace our first XenServer soon but want to introduce some sort of SAN / NAS System, or I must just stick with local storage.

 

Pete

[IrritableTech]

We've got a MD3000i dual iSCSI controller SAN. Connecting via two HP E2910AL's and Qlogic dual port HBAs. A few months ago we bought a QNAP TS-1279U-RP 24TB as an additional lump of slow storage for stuff that isn't accessed very often. It performs surprisingly well though.

[twin--turbo]

Are we talink Citrix XenServer.

 

Or are we talking Xen Hypervisor on anopther platform?

 

 

Rob

[twin--turbo]

If it's Citrix then we have 6 paid for XenServers and 3 Free 5.6.2 ( going to upgrade to 6.2 on them )

[CyberNerd]

Are we talink Citrix XenServer.

 

Or are we talking Xen Hypervisor on anopther platform?

 

 

Rob

 

Both I think. They are the same thing. Citrix is just one implementation of Xen, there are plenty of others with differing support models.

[twin--turbo]

There is a distinction between Citrix XenServer and Xen running on something Like Suse.

 

I tried the latter once, but that was ~7 years ago.

 

Rob