Google Virtual Server Management
Posted by Fraser Campbell Tue, 04 Sep 2007 02:37:00 GMT
Recently appearing on Google Code is the Ganeti project.
Ganeti “is a virtual server management software tool built on top of Xen virtual machine monitor and other Open Source software”.
Ganeti supports 1-25 physical nodes, and HA using DRBD. It is interesting to see something based on DRBD, I had never considered it for production use but perhaps my reservations are unfounded.
I recently talked about this specific Google project in my blog, sorry it’s in french http://chercheletrouble.blogspot.com/2007/09/comme-google-utilise-xen-comme.html… but I don’t mind translate it in english.
but I can quickly translate the generic theme: I’m troubled about the fact google is still using Xen to do virtualization, considering they only virtualizing linux.
Xen is far more complex to use than OpenVZ and I personnaly wonder why DRBD ? unless it’s database or some data you can’t afford to loose… crunching node should not be kept in a redundant block device.
I do agree to some extent. It depends what the target really is.
If you are virtualizing one Linux flavour (Debian or RHEL or …) then using Xen doesn’t really make sense.
If on the other hand you wish to virtualize multiple Linux flavours (Debian and RHEL and …) then Xen obviously makes a lot of sense.
I would have said in the past that Xen makes sense even for a single flavour of Linux due to it’s live migration support however, these days, even OpenVZ is claiming live migration support so the container solution is much more attractive.
And DRBD definitely seems strange to me, I don’t have any personal proof that it is flakey but it just doesn’t strike me as a solution that is likely to be high-performance or robust.
Man you don’t even know how long I’ve waited for this since disabling my own Movable Type widget (that doesn’t work since Haloscan bypasses that code).
THANK YOU !