<div><font color="#330033"><font size="2"><font face="verdana,sans-serif">Interesting... Novell/Attachmate -- they (Attachmate) say they will run Novell and SuSE as separate business units. Not sure how the play between a Platespin branded product and SuSE Linux will get along in the future. Remains to be seen.</font></font></font></div>
<div><font color="#330033"><font size="2"><font face="verdana,sans-serif"></font></font></font> </div>
<div><font color="#330033"><font size="2"><font face="verdana,sans-serif">But whilst on the topic of KVM, performance, and VM costs... let's break this down a bit.</font></font></font></div>
<div><font color="#330033"><font size="2"><font face="verdana,sans-serif"></font></font></font> </div>
<div><font color="#330033"><font size="2"><font face="verdana,sans-serif">I propose that you could (if you really wanted to), run an Open SuSE server, with shared storage (GigE NFS), and KVM, and across multiple hosts, you could get Vmotion-like stuff to happen. Hot-migrate is TBD, but cold migrate would be a snap. Host affinity/anti-affinity rules, elegant virtual switching, Storage Vmotion, Fault Tolerance, and Dynamic Resource Scheduling are all probably more than any of us could emulate with even the slickest of bash/perl/python hacks on our own. -- But those things are only valuable if they're valuable _to_you_. Backing up a little bit... if NFS won't cut it for your workload, you could go with OCFS2, GFS, Lustre, or other cluster-aware FS but be prepared for the added overhead/management of dealing with fenced nodes and what not. </font></font></font></div>
<div><font color="#330033"><font size="2"><font face="verdana,sans-serif"></font></font></font> </div>
<div><font color="#330033"><font size="2"><font face="verdana,sans-serif">VMware SRM is only valuable when you have everything virtualized, and in most larger environments, you still have Z, or other proprietary UNIX laying around, and it's going to be running apps, replicating data, and doing it's own DR thing alongside.</font></font></font></div>
<div><font color="#330033" face="Verdana"></font> </div>
<div><font color="#330033" face="Verdana">I know that RedHat bought the KVM/Qemu stuff, and are selling that as RHEV -- and as their people put it, it's 80% of VMware's features for 20% of the price. I get it, but I think that's a bit disingenuous, as KVM is open source, and what RH is actually selling is their support structure and management tools... Because the same KVM/Qemu stuff is available in OpenSuSE, Centos, etc. as well, it's just not called RHEV. </font></div>
<div><font color="#330033"><font size="2"><font face="verdana,sans-serif"></font></font></font> </div>
<div><font color="#330033"><font size="2"><font face="verdana,sans-serif">Short version: VMware is a market leader, but they are neither free, nor are they cheap. Can you get close with KVM or even Xen? Sure. But you're making up the difference in missing features, functionality, and overall product maturity.</font></font></font></div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Brian Miller <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bnmille@gmail.com">bnmille@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote style="BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; PADDING-LEFT: 1ex" class="gmail_quote">
<div class="im">On 12/15/2010 03:38 PM, Scott Merrill wrote:<br><br>> On a similar vein, how are you folks handling the management of<br>> virtualized servers in your environments? It's trivial with KVM and<br>
> similar tools to run a couple of virtual instances on a single<br>> physical box. It's not so trivial to run those virtual instances in a<br>> highly available fashion across a cluster of physical machines.<br>
<br></div>We use Vmotion in our environment. Another (pay) option is Platespin,<br>which Novell obtained by a buyout a few years back. See<br> <a href="http://www.novell.com/products/migrate/" target="_blank">http://www.novell.com/products/migrate/</a> for more details. We never<br>
really evaluated it, but I did watch a demonstration once. It seemed<br>pretty good. Of course, you'd be dealing with Novell, so depending on<br>your politics and/or concern over what Attachemate might do, you might<br>
want to wait.<br>
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