[Users] Multiple Engines, one web Interface?

[Darrell Budic]

Now that we’ve got a self hosted engine, has any one given any thought to allowing one engine to remotely control another?

The scenario I’m imagining has one cluster at a DC with 4 nodes, and another cluster at a different DC with 3 nodes. Connectivity is normally pretty good, but it’s been known to drop for a bit every year. And I wouldn’t want to have the engine polling across it all the time as it’s a lower bandwidth link (100M vs 10G between nodes, so a bit). But what I would like is to have the one I’m sitting next to be able to control the remote one, and monitor it’s status, with each having it’s own self hosted engine so they are independent and migrations, etc, will continue to happen even if the two clusters get disconnected. This keeps all the polling local and fast, and avoids engine or cluster freak outs if/when the link is down between the two physically diverse clusters. 

Cool bonus feature would be to enable a direct transfer between the two clusters storage facilities. Maybe with a “transport VM” button that suspends it to disk and moves it before restarting it (assuming you built your networks right, of course, complex but presumably possible), but I’d with a simple way to copy a shutdown VM over without going through an export/import process.

I could see this working with a separate manager engine, or just as an add in to the standard engine. Maybe a “cluster w/ local engine” type thing showing in the GUI.

Obviously two web interfaces on two separate engines aren’t a terribly hard thing to manage, but I just imagined the simple way and figured I’d throw it out there and see how hard or easy people thought it might be.

  -Darrell