[NTLUG:Discuss] Summit presentation on virtualization and clustering

[Thomas Cameron]

On Fri, 2008-07-04 at 11:45 -0500, Chris Cox wrote:
> Thomas Cameron (Red Hat) wrote:
> > Hey All -
> > 
> > In the hope that it will be helpful, I've posted the presentation that
> > Lon Hohberger and I did at Summit.  In it we go over:
> > 
> > Setting up an iSCSI target (tech preview only in RHEL 5.2)
> > Setting up iSCSI initiators
> > Setting up a cluster of virtualization hosts (dom0 machines)
> > Setting up a cluster of virtual machines (domU machines)
> > Setting up Apache and a virtual ip address as a clustered service on the
> > domU machines
> > 
> > All of this is on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2.
> 
> Wow... a lot of configuration!  I know why I loathe iSCSI so much :)

Yeah, to be honest, the reason I volunteered for this was that I had not
done a lot of these things before.  I muddled around quite a bit with
iSCSI before I figured it out, but once I had it running, it was
seriously cool.

> I imagine the virtual machine setup will be simpler with Red Hat's
> use of kvm?

Nah, it will be the same if you use the GUI.  The whole point of libvirt
is that the interface doesn't change whether you use Xen, KVM, or
whatever the Next Big Thing(TM) turns out to be in the future (I think
KVM will be around for quite a while.

> Very good read.  Is GSF2 ready now?  I thought it was in the
> kernel (??).

GFS2 is a tech preview in RHEL 5.2.  It is there, and it seems to work
well for me, but Lon (serious badass clustering developer at Red Hat)
says that right now there are some weaknesses around performance when
there is a lot of metadata manipulation.  So as you add lots of tiny
files and metadata like permissions, ownership, directory info and the
like is changed, there are currently some performance hits.  Those are
being ironed out, and my understanding is that they are being ironed out
well and quickly.  So we hope to have it fully supported in RHEL 5.3.
No promises, though.  We won't call it baked til it really is.

> 
> > 
> > Take a peek at http://people.redhat.com/tcameron for the Summit 2008
> > presentation.
> > 
> > Sorry for the delay in posting to this list, I've been on the road
> > non-stop since Summit and I'm just now getting to some past due
> > housekeeping.
> > 
> > Note that I did the presentation on laptops with no fence device, so I
> > did not set up fencing for the laptops.  I did cover fencing the VMs,
> > though.
> > 
> > Hope this is helpful!
> 
> VERY useful and helpful... thanks!!!!

Great!

TC