Re: [Xen-users] XCP Test workstation

[Grant McWilliams <grantmasterflash@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Brett Westover <bwestover@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I have a Dell PowerEdge 2900 with X5355 processors.
>
> I want to test the clustering features of XCP, but I don't have
another
> server handy. I am considering building a small machine in a desktop
> form factor that will be compatible, but that I can then re-use as a
> workstation later.
>
> I noticed this server board was on the Citrix HCL for XenServer 5.6
> FP2:
> Intel Server Board S1200BTS
>
> It will accept Xeon processors, but not the X5355 (not that those are
> even available anymore). I also didn't see the X5355 on the
> Heterogeneous CPU pool cross-reference at all.
>
> Does anyone have any experience with creating the right CPU masks to
> make two different CPUs work, and is there a model you recommend,
> versus
> models you don't recommend?
>
> My goal is an inexpensive test, so we can continue our transition from
> VMware ESX, to XCP. If necessary, we might just build two small
> machines
> and use those for the test. Can anyone recommend some inexpensive
> workstation class hardware, that will work to test out a pooled
> configuration?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Brett Westover
>

Does anyone have any recommendations for test hardware?

We are looking to buy something so that we can build some knowledge and
confidence in XCP as a suitable and more flexible replacement for ESX.
Ideally we'd just buy/build one machine that could be made compatible
with the one test server we have, but if it was easier and not terribly
expensive we'd just buy two identical machines.

Am I overcomplicating this?

Thanks, Brett

I'm sure there will be various opinions on this but after going down the "really expensive but rarely upgradable" path I just build commodity servers for XCP now. Each host has a 2u case, hexicore cpu, 16 GB of ram, a local drive that's currently used for nothing much and two network interfaces. With each I buy a 240 GB SSD that goes in the SAN. So for $1000 I can drop one machine into the rack, plug in power, both network cables and slide the SSD into the SAN box and I've just expanded capacity by 30 VMs. Each VM gets 512 MB of ram and 7 GB of storage space. Any other storage can be pulled from larger disk based SAN shares via iSCSI or NFS. This allows me to expand very quickly and at a minimal cost.

For testing purposes you could do without the SSD drives. I'm looking at building a 128 core cloud to teach cloud computing using the same types of replaceable hosts. The cores will be divided up into smaller 16 core clouds each given to team of 4 students.

I think it would all depend on what you plan on doing with your cloud.


Grant McWilliams
http://grantmcwilliams.com/

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use Windows."
Now they have two problems.




 

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