Hosted-Engine vs Standalone Engine
Hello Folks, I have had to install a Hosted-Engine a few times in my environment. There have been some hardware issues and power issues that left the HE unrecoverable. In this situation, would the Standalone Engine install be more viable and less prone to become inoperable due to the previous issues? My assumption would be to have a head baremetal server run the Engine to control and maintain my blades. *Thank you,* *Ian*
On Wed, Mar 24, 2021, 23:04 Ian Easter <ieaster@telvue.com> wrote:
Hello Folks,
I have had to install a Hosted-Engine a few times in my environment. There have been some hardware issues and power issues that left the HE unrecoverable.
In this situation, would the Standalone Engine install be more viable and less prone to become inoperable due to the previous issues?
Usually, having a daily engine backup you are covered even in the rare case of full engine corruption. In the worst case one can wipe out the unrecoverable engine, setup a new one and restore its status from the backup. I had to do this once and it was fine.
My assumption would be to have a head baremetal server run the Engine to control and maintain my blades.
*Thank you,* *Ian*
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On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 11:04 PM Ian Easter <ieaster@telvue.com> wrote:
Hello Folks,
I have had to install a Hosted-Engine a few times in my environment. There have been some hardware issues and power issues that left the HE unrecoverable.
In this situation, would the Standalone Engine install be more viable and less prone to become inoperable due to the previous issues?
My assumption would be to have a head baremetal server run the Engine to control and maintain my blades.
With a standalone engine, it's your responsibility to take care of the engine's machine. If it breaks, it's up to you to recover. If you are an experienced sysadmin, you might find this comfortable. Perhaps you know well how to identify what got broken, fix/replace it, restore your backups, etc. With a hosted-engine, instead of a physical machine, you have a virtual machine. This VM is controlled by a set of daemons, including their data/configuration scattered around several places. Collectively, they are called 'ovirt-hosted-engine-ha' (together with other stuff, obviously - qemu/libvirt/vdsm, systemd, ...), or HA for short. If you know HA as well as your physical hardware, then I do not think there is an essential difference. If you know well where to look if there are problems, how to replace/fix stuff, restore backups, etc., then it's in theory the same. But: It's up to you to get to know HA. And this is knowledge that is to a large extent oVirt-specific and unrelated to your previous knowledge and experience. HA obviously has other advantages - it provides cheap HA (that's why it's named like that) using your existing hardware, it's easy to set up - at least compared to setting up an HA oVirt engine using external HA means (e.g. linux-ha/corosync/pacemaker/heartbeat/VCS etc.), and it often works well. But to feel comfortable with it, you do have to learn it. If HA's extra features etc. are not relevant for you, and having a single BM machine for the engine is ok for your use case, and you know Linux well but do not know well HA, and have extra hardware/rack space to allocate for the engine machine, then a standalone engine is probably better for you. Same if you do this mainly for debugging/learning/etc. - a standalone engine is simpler, easier to understand and debug. Just my 2c. Best regards, -- Didi
participants (3)
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Alex K -
Ian Easter -
Yedidyah Bar David