----- Original Message -----
From: "Johan Kragsterman"
<johan.kragsterman(a)capvert.se>
To: "Dan Yasny" <dyasny(a)redhat.com>
Cc: users(a)ovirt.org
Sent: Thursday, 2 August, 2012 8:12:45 AM
Subject: Re: [Users] host raiding two LUN from different external storage
Hi!
Dan, it seems you know something about storage, so I adress you:
I find the oVirt storage framework a bit odd. It has it advantages,
but also a lot of disadvantiages, it seems.
I did earlier, in this thread, ask about storage setups you want to
use in enterprise environments. And I like to continue that
discussion.
If you like to replicate on SAN level between, let's say two
different LUN's, that should contain the same informnation for a
host, or for a VM, then you end up in trouble if you use the oVirt
storage system. Because you need to put the two LUN's from the
different datacenters together, to become ONE unit, otherwise you
don't get the right uuid for live migration. Isn't right?
If you are using SAN level replication, it is not an active/active replication. The second
replica is in standby, and if the first LUN fails, you can substitute with the replica (of
course you can have corruption that gets replicated and then the storage is gone. RAID is
never a substitution for backups).
With oVirt, if you have an offsite LUN replica, for DR reasons, you can take that LUN and
attach to an offsite replica of the oVirt setup (engine plus hosts) - and the original
storage domain will be right there for you to use. Once the DR setup is operational, VMs
can live migrate within it.
As you wrote earlier, this might be solved with gluster, but is it
so, that oVirt is going to get enterprise features only in pair with
gluster? I don't believe that is a good idea for the adoption of
oVirt.
Gluster has the replication feature built in. So do most enterprise grade storage
solutions. If your SAN supports LUN replication, this feature can be used with oVirt or
any other system that keeps data on the LUN, no special magic there.
oVirt must have a good support for enterprise features that is used
today, like NPIV. I have googled around oVirt and NPIV and didn't
come up with much, you can tell me something about it?
NPIV is completely out of context here. Generally speaking, Linux supports NPIV (see
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VirtStorageManagement) so if you handle the actual
commands, and oVirt hosts see the LUNs in dev/mapper it will work. In very broad terms of
course, oVirt does not care how device-mapper gets to see the LUNs, if they are visible,
normally, they can be used.
If you are talking about incorporating NPIV settings in oVirt engine host management, then
it's a feature that needs to be spec'd out in the oVirt wiki first, and since
it's an open project, anyone willing to actually develop it is welcome to contribute.
I belive it would be good if oVirt supported other storage system
types than the one system it supports today, that all storage should
be imported and handled by LVM and oVirt engine.
You mean clustered filesystems? We already support those, look at PosixFS.
But still, LVM provides a huge advantage over a classical clustered FS - less overhead,
simple management using standard Linux commands, amazing scalability (what other
virtualization solution scales to hundreds of hosts out of the box?)
Most enterprise storage today is fibre channel and NPIV based. You
boot most the VM's through NPIV LUN's, you add more space through
thin provisioning or more NPIV LUN's.
And this is going to continue, even if the Fc world move to FCoE.
Actually, I haven't seen NPIV used too much, normally, when you have an FC
infrastructure in place, purchasing an extra port/HBA is not an issue, and it's so
much easier to manage without virtualizing - plug your cables in, set up zones, and
you're good to go.
So I don't agree about "most", but as I said before, if you want to use
NPIV, you can, oVirt will simply not manage it for you, at least not in the current
version.
So perhaps you can tell me a little bit about the storage strategy
that oVirt dev team has?
Everything is in the wiki - read the storage related feature pages. And if you want to
pitch in, you are always welcome to
Rgrds Johan
-----Dan Yasny <dyasny(a)redhat.com> skrev: -----
Till: Johan Kragsterman <johan.kragsterman(a)capvert.se>
Från: Dan Yasny <dyasny(a)redhat.com>
Datum: 2012.07.29 12:55
Kopia: users(a)ovirt.org
Ärende: Re: [Users] host raiding two LUN from different external
storage
You can use replicated at the SAN level storage between different
DCs, for DR. You can also use Gluster for the same purpose.
Setting RAID1 between two geographically separate hosts is asking for
trouble.
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Johan Kragsterman" <johan.kragsterman(a)capvert.se>
> To: users(a)ovirt.org
> Sent: Sunday, 29 July, 2012 12:08:20 PM
> Subject: [Users] host raiding two LUN from different external
> storage
>
> Hi!
>
> In some setups, like when you got two datacenters that works like
> failover sites, you would like to have two external raid
> controllers(storage devices), one in each datacenter.
>
> You then send two identical LUN's, from each controller, to a
> cluster, let's say two hosts, for simplicity. What you normally do
> is to host raid these LUN's in mirror(raid 1), so the hosts write
> the same to both LUN's, and both controllers.
>
> Question for me here is if I can accomplish this in oVirt
> management?
> Because if I can't, it will be a problem, because if I host raid at
> the host level, then the storage would be local storage for oVirt,
> wouldn't it? And then I suppose it can't be used for live
> migration,
> can it?
>
> Regrds Johan
> _______________________________________________
> Users mailing list
> Users(a)ovirt.org
>
http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/users
>
--
Regards,
Dan Yasny
Red Hat Israel
+972 9769 2280
--
Regards,
Dan Yasny
Red Hat Israel
+972 9769 2280