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xen-users
Re: [Xen-users] blade servers
John Madden wrote:
On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 03:44 +0900, Tomoki Taniguchi wrote:
so could xen be installed on such hardware?
Yes, the OS can't tell the difference, it looks like a normal machine,
which is somewhat the point.
where are the network interfaces located?
on the blades or the encloser?
This is dependent on the hardware vendor, but to the machine, won't
matter (see above). IBM xSeries Bladecenters (I can personally very
strongly recommend these) actually have Cisco switch modules that plug
in in the back and look like normal gig switches. Internally, you're
given two ethN devices on the linux host -- the ethernet cards are on
the blades themselves.
From experience, they're typically on a network switch that's part of
the enclusure itself. High end blades, such as the very sweet IBM
bladecenters, have a built-in management console to provide remote KVM
access to individual blades. (It's actually VNC based, which made me
laugh like hell when I realized because I wrote one of the early SunOS
ports of VNC, so I was already aware of some of its limitations.)
You want to think, hard, about whether the switching configurations on
them is what you want if you're doing high performance computing. The
internal switches aren't normally very sophisticated nor extremely high
bandwidth, and can be saturatied by massive traffic, such as running
lots and lots of NFS based operating systems. Xen iSCSI or NFS based
OS's could compound the problem, since these systems typically do not
have a lot of local disk storage, and what they have is typically 2.5"
hard drive based.
More money, more features and better testing of the hardware before it
arrives on your doorstep. Less money, cheaper blades, inferior
"motherboards of the week" that fell off some employee's uncle's truck
in Taiwan, inferior and out-of-date add-on components, untested serial
console features, amazingly stupid BIOS defaults, no remote KVM,
untested RAM, fans that work better as paperweights, ducting made out of
what acts like tin foil, etc. Like all systems, you can save a lot of
money up-front and wind up seriously paying for it down the road. (I've
seen this happen, up close and personal.)
I've been involved in designing blades and Beowulf clusters: I wish I'd
had Xen for blade use when I was doing that, it could have saved me a
lot of kernel upgrade pain.
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