Hey all, I'm embarking on a project involving virtualization and
thought I'd consult the list in a wisdom-of-crowds fashion :-)
At my workplace we use virtualization to support test and development
of our products. That is, we have a team of about 8 staff creating VMs
of a custom Linux distribution and sometimes many such VMs connected
in virtual networks. There is also a requirement to add VMs of 4 or 5
other staff (each of those with up to 200Gb of VMs) to this workload.
Basically, I'm wondering what folks use to provide a reliable,
fast and highly-available virtualization infrastructure for
internal use only to serve the above usage scenario. In my research,
it seems the big virtualization vendors are geared to folks
using constantly running VMs that are serving websites, databases etc.
Our existing infrastructure is creaking a bit - solely for VMWare we
have a single Dell
1750 1U with Dual Xeon 2.4Ghz (with hyper-threading stuff it acts like
4 cores), 4 GBs of RAM (10Gb of swap) and SCSI discs in hardware
RAID5 using the Dell hardware raid gubbins. We have problems with slow
response, weird ARP issues and suchlike. I should add that it has a
Gigabit ethernet nic but our network is not all gigabit yet but thats
coming soon. This is with VMWare Server 1.0.4 (Free edition).
We look to spend time to save money so the free versions of software
from the "big 2 or 3" look very attractive. I have been looking at
VMWare (Free or ESXi), Citrix Xen (XenServer 5 Express) and
VirtualIron. My users need some kind of GUI client or agent to perform
management and admin of their own VMs/networks (and ideally kept
separate from everyone else). This means a Linux GUI client (for
Ubuntu/Fedora would be lovely) is a MUST. I take it as read that each
vendor has a Windows client. We're using the free VMWare Workstation
at the moment which has a Linux client. I'm finding it hard to find
out who exactly has a Linux client and their websites are often
confusing if one is new to virtualization. (sometimes Wikipedia can
help cut through the marketing puff in these kinds of cases :-)
Regarding hardware I was looking at going one of two ways -
a) expensive - a Dell 1950 + DAS (direct attached storage) such as
their MediaVault MD1000 + some fast SAS discs. This particular Dell
has support for VMWare ESXi at the firmware level which effectively
turns it into a "VMWare appliance" with the resulting VMs having a
smaller footprint.
b) cheaper - several cheaper Dells such as the PowerEdge T105 with say
8Gb RAM each and fast SATA drives acting as a cluster. That is, each
node with their own VMs running but the whole cluster with one central
management console. Both XenSource and VMWare have features to allow
moving VMs between nodes in clusters without interruptions to the
running VM.
I'm going to be at the meeting this Saturday so if anyone there is
willing to chat to me about their own virtualization infrastructure
experiences then I am all ears :-)
