3.1.0beta Teleportation

[Sasquatch]

Teleporting the whole image has nothing to do with maintenance but with long term loadbalancing which is a typical piece of daily work for an VM admin (just moved 250GB Images around).

And for proper load balancing, you make sure that your images are accessible from every Host, else it's just useless to 'loadbalance' the bunch.

[Technologov]

Does it makes sense to add storage migration to VirtualBox too ? (i.e. live teleport the ISO and the VDI)

It may be useful for small companies, that do not have single shared storage (such as NFS/iSCSI).

What do you think ?

[Bernd Hohmann]

Teleporting the whole image has nothing to do with maintenance but with long term loadbalancing which is a typical piece of daily work for an VM admin (just moved 250GB Images around).

And for proper load balancing, you make sure that your images are accessible from every Host, else it's just useless to 'loadbalance' the bunch.

Could you kindly tell me how many servers and VMs you have to deal with? Maybe I can get an idea why you refuse to understand *fg*

Bernd

[Bernd Hohmann]

It may be useful for small companies, that do not have single shared storage (such as NFS/iSCSI).

To have a shared storage isn't a real problem. But cheap SANs have the "single point of failure" problem again. So you need at least 2 host bus adapters per server, 2 fabrics and one expensive disk array (or 2 cheaper disk arrays). Too much money if 24/7 isn't a requirement.

Moving the whole VM around in the background would be a nice feature, if not - the customer has to bear the downtime.

Bernd

[Sasquatch]

Could you kindly tell me how many servers and VMs you have to deal with? Maybe I can get an idea why you refuse to understand *fg*

I'm not in the real business world yet, but the project group at school has two storage servers with iSCSI and NFS, a couple of Xen hosts and has everything set up for high availability. All done with Ubuntu 8.04. The total amount of VMs that are running are near 10 or so. Whenever one of the Hosts need to have some maintenance, the VM it's running is send to another Host that has enough resources left and is then send back when it's done.

Now, this whole set-up is done with simple desktop systems, as school didn't want to invest anything for us, but so far, it didn't have any issues. The storage is done on two 500 GB SATA disks per server, making it a total of 4x 500 GB in spare per host, mirrored over the network.

[Bernd Hohmann]

I'm not in the real business world yet, but the project group at school has two storage servers with iSCSI and NFS, a couple of Xen hosts and has everything set up for high availability. All done with Ubuntu 8.04. The total amount of VMs that are running are near 10 or so. Whenever one of the Hosts need to have some maintenance, the VM it's running is send to another Host that has enough resources left and is then send back when it's done.

9 Servers, (32GB RAM, 8 Cores, 1.8TB RAID-5), about 120-170 VMs (depends on the daytime). Last quoting for a proper SAN infrastructure for that was about 60.000 EUR in summer 2009 (more than the whole servers did cost).

Fortunately we don't have 24/7 requirements and enough time for maintenance in the night of the various timezones, but shoveling whole VMs around without shutdown has its charm.

Bernd