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Critique a Xenserver setup

F

Fuser

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 7, 2005
Messages
99
I'm looking at a project to replace 8-10 servers.

8 of the servers are SMP netburst Xeons (without VT support huzza, and the 140TDP+ monsters), DDR ECC, SCA SCSI. Basically they take up more room, power, AC then its worth to keep them running. Not to mention the cost of upgrading the hardware is more then purchasing a new solution. Other few servers are old COTS or 1u p2-500MHz's

So here's the plan, we have a half a rack unused at the moment so I'd like to consolidate all the servers plus some old COTS with a new setup and also provide rapid testing boxes. The servers are not IO intensive, at most a 1-2 user concurrent file access to some old material, we have a centralized server that has offloaded file storage from most of these servers. We are looking for a solution to roll all of our application testing/compilers and dev boxes, side note most are Linux, with 1-2 Windows hosts.


SAN:
Using Openfiler to provide an iSCSI service in a hardware RAID5 to the Xenservers via GbE backend

Xen servers:
Looking at building two for failover and heat beating (if we decide to go with essential).

I'm going heavy on the front end and maybe too light on the ram but my major concern is the SAN. I was thinking of deploying the Xenservers with the hard drives in the i7 boxes but the cost to switch to a dedicated SAN host was not much more. And it offers the features of having quick swaping/migration to one server to another. Any comments, idea's, or pitfalls I have to watch out for?
 
Looks Good, are you going to net boot the xen servers? For the xen servers you should pick up another 2 sticks of ram to max out the slots for 16GB ram and a ram to core ratio of 2:1. What raid level are you going to run on the SAN?
 
jtg1993 said:
Looks Good, are you going to net boot the xen servers? For the xen servers you should pick up another 2 sticks of ram to max out the slots for 16GB ram and a ram to core ratio of 2:1. What raid level are you going to run on the SAN?
Click to expand...

Either netboot or USB install where i'm not worried about security. At worst I have ton's of 80GB SATA's to load for local install.

I traded off 4GB to offset the cost of the 3ware card, defiantly will look into extra funds to fill out the ranks. Looking at implementing RAID5 on the SAN.
 
I would not get TYAN

too many bad experiences

Other than that looks cool.
 
I will second nitrobass and say I would avoid TYAN. I have never had much luck with their boards.

If you must stick with TYAN, then you must, but if you can, look into Supermicro or ASUS boards.

Other than that, the setup looks good, and if these are not production environments, then you don't need to worry much about maxing out the ram. I assume you are looking into XenServer because of the Live Migration built in? I would recommend doing a local install of XenServer, with just the guests on the SAN. This means both servers wont go down if you have an issue with the netboot image or something similar
 
Obviously budget here is an issue, or te OpenFiler machine would not be in the equation. So, with that being said, I will leave the OpenFiler build out alone (mostly). I will say that the 3Ware card is a good choice. Other notable cards are Adaptec 5xxx series, Dell Perc5/i, some of the Intels, and Arecas.

However, it may be worth mentioning that you'll likely not want more than 3 (as a maximum) VMs per usable spindle on the iSCSI target. Having used OpenFiler myself in demo environments, it works well enough, but on SATA drives @ 7200RPM, you're probably going to want to keep from oversubscribing your spindles. Please also be aware that your 3Ware should have both a BBU and a decent amount of cache. I would recommend 1GB as a minimum, and 2GB cache would be even better. Also, check to ensure that it's not a host-based RAID solution. I'm not all that familiar with 3Ware offerings, so this may be a non-issue. If you find that you'll need more than 9-10 VMs in your environment, I would recommend that you add more spindles, and decrease the size. In addition to providing better performance, it will also decrease your rebuilt times, if you ever need that feature.

I hear some say don't buy TYAN. I personally can recount many horror stories of old TYAN issues (like 5+ years ago) on the Socket 462 Athlon MP systems, but I have built many TYAN boxes in the past few years, and all have been without issue. On the opposite side, I have also built many Supermicro machines in the past few years, and many have been plagued with issues. I think the fit/finish of the Supermicro solutions is better, but TYAN makes it easier with their pre-built Chassis +PSU + Board+Optical configurations.

Go with what you like, and hope the gods don't get angry, is all I can say. XenServer worked well for me in my demo environment, and it was (in my opinion) the best option to ESXi currently available. Have you used XenServer before?
 
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