[Users] Asking for advice on hosted engine

[Gilad Chaplik]

cc'ing Sahina :-)

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Doron Fediuck" <dfediuck at redhat.com>
> To: "Giorgio Bersano" <giorgio.bersano at gmail.com>
> Cc: Users at ovirt.org
> Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 11:53:46 AM
> Subject: Re: [Users] Asking for advice on hosted engine
> 
> 
> 
> ----- 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
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