[Users] Asking for advice on hosted engine

[Doron Fediuck]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Giorgio Bersano" <giorgio.bersano at gmail.com>
> To: Users at ovirt.org
> Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 11:20:36 AM
> Subject: [Users] Asking for advice on hosted engine
> 
> Hello everybody,
> I discovered oVirt a couple of months ago when I was looking for the
> best way to manage our small infrastructure. I have read any document
> I considered useful but I would like to receive advice from the many
> experts that are on this list.
> 
> I think it worths an introduction (I hope doesn't get you bored).
> 
> I work in a small local government entity and I try to manage
> effectively our limited resources.
> We have many years of experience with Linux and especially with CentOS
> which we have deployed on PC (i.e. for using as firewall in remote
> locations) and moreover on servers.
> 
> We have been using Xen virtualization from the early days of CentOS 5
> and  we have built our positive experience on KVM too.
> I have to say that libvirt in a small environment like ours is really
> a nice tool.
> So nothing to regret.
> 
> Trying to go a little further, as already said, I stumbled upon oVirt
> and I've found the project intriguing.
> 
> At the moment we are thinking of deploying it on a small environment
> of four very similar servers each having:
> - a couple of Xeon E5504
> - 6 x 1Gb ethernet interfaces
> - 40 GB of RAM
> two of them have 72 GB of disk (mirrored)
> two of them have almost 500GB of useful RAID array
> 
> Moreover we have an HP iSCSI storage that should easily satisfy our
> current storage requirement.
> 
> So, given our small server pool, the necessity of another host just to
> run the supervisor seems a requirement too high.
> 
> Enter "hosted engine" and the picture takes brighter colors. Well, I'm
> usually not the adventurous guy but after experimenting a little with
> oVirt 3.4 I developed better confidence.
> We would want to install the engine over the two hosts with smaller disks.
> 
> For what I know, installing hosted engine mandates NFS storage. But we
> want this to be highly available too, and possibly to have it on the
> very same hosts.
> 
> Here is my solution: make a gluster replicated volume across the two
> hosts and take advantage of that NFS server.
> Then I put 127.0.0.1 as the address of the NFS server in the
> hosted-engine-setup so  the host is always able to reach the storage
> server (itself).
> GlusterFS configuration is done outside of oVirt that, regarding
> engine's storage, doesn't even know that it's a gluster thing.
> 
> Relax, we've finally reached the point where I'm asking advice :-)
> 
> Storage and virtualization experts, do you see in this configuration
> any pitfall that I've overlooked given my inexperience in oVirt,
> Gluster, NFS or clustered filesystems?
> Do you think that not only it's feasable (I know it is, I made it and
> it's working now) but it's also reliable and dependable and I'm not
> risking my neck on this setup?
> 
> I've obviously made some test but I'm not at the confidence level of
> saying that all is right in the way it is designed.
> 
> OK, I think I've already written too much, better I stop and humbly
> wait for your opinion but I'm obviously here if any clarification by
> my part  is needed.
> 
> Thank you very much for reading until this point.
> Best Regards,
> Giorgio.

Hi Giorgio,
First of all I'm happy you're happy with your hosted engine setup ;)

Please remember that it will be included it oVirt 3.4 which was not
released yet, and we keep testing it. So any feedback from you will
be more than welcomed, and please keep tracking for the bugs we fix.

As for storage and high-availability, we are aware of a few potential
things Gluster are working on. So adding Sahina to comment as needed.

Doron