[Users] new oVirt installation recommendations
David Sloane
dsloane at sitespect.com
Tue Oct 8 14:43:44 UTC 2013
Regarding power management, if you get DRAC (Enterprise or Basic, not sure) you should be able to do out-of-band power management.
If you're going to spend the money for three R620's with 128 GB of RAM each and dual cpu's, you might be a little better off with a 2nd root HDD for redundancy.
-----Original Message-----
From: users-bounces at ovirt.org [mailto:users-bounces at ovirt.org] On Behalf Of Jason Keltz
Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2013 9:44 AM
To: Itamar Heim
Cc: users at ovirt.org
Subject: Re: [Users] new oVirt installation recommendations
On 10/07/2013 02:35 PM, Itamar Heim wrote:
> On 10/07/2013 06:13 PM, Jason Keltz wrote:
>> I've been experimenting with oVirt 3.2 on some old hardware, and am
>> now preparing to buy new hardware for using oVirt 3.3 in production.
>> I'm interested in any feedback about what I plan to purchase. I want
>> to keep the setup as simple as possible. Our current environment
>> consists of mostly CentOS 6.4 systems.
>>
>> The combined oVirt engine and file server will be a Dell R720 with dual
>> Xeon E5-2660 and 64 GB of memory. The server would have an LSI 9207-8i
>> HBA connected to the SAS backplane. The R720 enclosure has 16 x 2.5"
>> disk slots. I would get 2 x 500 GB NLSAS drives for mirrored md rood
>> (raid1), use 12 slots for RAID10 SAS 10K rpm drives (either 600 GB or
>> 900 GB), and have an additional 2 spares. Data storage would be
>> virtual machines, and some associated data. The O/S would be CentOS
>> 6.4.
>>
>> The nodes would be 3 x Dell R620, dual Xeon E5-2690, 128 GB memory,
>> each with just a single, small NL SAS root drive. There would be no
>> other local storage. All VMs would use the file server as the
>> datastore. The nodes would run oVirt node.
>>
>> In terms of networking, each machine would have 4 ports - 2 x 1 Gb
>> (bonded) giving machines access to "public" network (that we do not
>> control). The 2 x 10 Gb copper would be connected to a locally
>> installed copper 10G switch that we fully control - 1 port used for
>> storage, and 1 for management/consoles/VM migration.
>>
>> A few additional notes ...
>>
>> I chose to stick with software raid MD on the file server, mostly for
>> cost, and simplicity. I have a lot of experience good with MD, and
>> performance seems reasonable.
>>
>> I would have gone SSD for the file server root disk, but the cost
>> from Dell for their SSD is prohibitive, and I want the whole system
>> to be included in the warranty. NLSAS is the cheapest disk that will
>> have support for the duration of the warranty period (with Dell
>> servers, SATA drives are only warranted for 1 year).
>>
>> The nodes with 1 NLSAS drive... I've thought about replacing that
>> with simply an SD card. It's not clear if this the best solution, or
>> how much space I would need on that card. At least when I configure
>> via the Dell web site, the biggest SD card it seems I can purchase
>> with a server is 2 GB which doesn't seem like very much! I guess people guy bigger
>> cards separately. I know a disk will work, and give me more than
>> enough space and no hassle.
>>
>> I've chosen to keep the setup simple by using NFS on the file server,
>> but I see a whole lot of people here experimenting with the new
>> Gluster capabilities in oVirt 3.3. It's not clear if that's being
>> used in production, or how reliable that would be. I really can't
>> find information on performance tests, etc with Gluster and oVirt, in
>> particular, with comparison of NFS and Gluster. Would there be a
>
> gluster is still not available for centos 6.4, and there are some
> issues with snapshots around it still for libgfapi.
> for posixfs, its supported since 3.2.
>
Ok. I guess it's probably best that I stick with NFS for this time around.
>> performance advantage to using Gluster here? How would it work? by
>> adding disk to the nodes, and getting rid of the file server (or at
>> least turning the file server into a smaller engine only server)?
>> How would this impact the nodes in terms of their ability to handle VMs?
>> (performance?) I presently have no experience with Gluster
>> whatsoever, though I'm certainly never against learning something
>> new, especially should it benefit my project. Unfortunately, as I'm
>> positive everyone can attest for is that it's just trouble finding
>> the number of hours in the day :) There's one thing for sure -
>> Gluster itself, while maybe not TOO complicated is still more complicated than an NFS only setup.
>
> I don't have details on this, and hope others have.
> but you are correct its an entirely different deployment architecture
> between a central nfs server, and distributed storage on the nodes.
>
It would be helpful if the documentation for oVirt had more information on this.
>>
>> As I've mentioned before, we don't use LDAP for authentication, so
>> I'll be restricted to one admin user at the moment unless I setup a
>> separate infrastructure for oVirt authentication. That will be fine
>> for a little while. I understand that work may be underway for
>> pluggable authentication with oVirt. I'm not sure if that ties into
>> any of the items on Itamar's list though. Itamar? :) I was hoping to
>> see that pluggable authentication model sooner rather than later so
>> that I could write something to work with our custom auth system.
>
> well, you could also launch an openldap/ipa/ad/etc. in a VM. of course
> if it has issues you'd need admin at internal to fix it.
>
I was thinking of doing this if I had to, but it's still a lot of headache for a few logins.
Is the pluggable authentication coming in a new version of oVirt?
>>
>> In terms of power management - my existing machines are using a
>> Raritan KVM with Raritan power management dongles and power bars. I
>> haven't had an opportunity to see if oVirt can manage the devices,
>> but I guess if oVirt can't do it, I can continue to manage power
>> through the KVM interface.
>
> are they supported by fence-agents in centos?
>
I've never tried. I don't often need to power off hosts the hard way..
a reboot it usually fine. When I do need to power manage hosts, I go into the Raritan KVM, click on the host, and turn it off, and back on, and everything is fine. I haven't done any connection to Linux.
>>
>> Any feedback would be much appreciated.
>>
With your experience with oVirt, any feedback on the hardware/NFS server combination?
Jason.
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