WARNING - OLD ARCHIVES

This is an archived copy of the Xen.org mailing list, which we have preserved to ensure that existing links to archives are not broken. The live archive, which contains the latest emails, can be found at http://lists.xen.org/
   
 
 
Xen 
 
Home Products Support Community News
 
   
 

xen-users

Re: [Xen-users] Re: Redundant server setup

To: Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] Re: Redundant server setup
From: Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 11 May 2006 21:11:48 -0400
Cc: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Delivery-date: Thu, 11 May 2006 18:12:31 -0700
Envelope-to: www-data@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In-reply-to: <20060511231526.GB21506@xxxxxxxxxxx>
List-help: <mailto:xen-users-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=help>
List-id: Xen user discussion <xen-users.lists.xensource.com>
List-post: <mailto:xen-users@lists.xensource.com>
List-subscribe: <http://lists.xensource.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xen-users>, <mailto:xen-users-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=subscribe>
List-unsubscribe: <http://lists.xensource.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xen-users>, <mailto:xen-users-request@lists.xensource.com?subject=unsubscribe>
References: <20060511211348.GB14781@xxxxxxxxxxxx> <20060511231526.GB21506@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sender: xen-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060405 SeaMonkey/1.0.1
Matthew Palmer wrote:
On Thu, May 11, 2006 at 11:13:48PM +0200, John wrote:
Hello all,

I would like your advise/opinion on setting up a redundant Xen
infrastructure. We have two identical boxes now running xen: vs01 and
vs02 - interconnected with a cross cable on eth1.

What I would like to realize is my virtual hosts not being dependent on
(a) physical hardware and (b) potential Xen failures due to
misconfiration anywhere in the machine.
All virtual servers are running on vs01 and I plan to rsync
the whole /etc/xen directory to vs02 every night. I tried using scp and that
worked OK. Would this be a good setup to realize redundancy?

Not particularly.

What you want is drbd syncing your block devices, with heartbeat maintaining
the "services" of your domUs.  That'll save you from hardware failures, and
really nasty Xen misconfigurations (of the "I b0rk3d my grub" severity).  It
won't save you from minor stuff-ups, like giving a domU the wrong bridge --
but then again, there's not much that will manage to save yourself from
yourself like that.

To ensure that configurations are properly synced across dom0s, I'd highly
recommend a structured configuration management system like Puppet.  The
domUs can be managed using the same tool, as well.

I don't suppose anybody's written a HOWTO on this. I'm looking to do something similar.

Miles Fidelman

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users