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Could someone recommend an opensource virtualisation cluster suite?!

I'm looking at setting up a 2-3 node cluster w/ 2 webservers 2 mysql and a virtualised loadbalancer for apache.

We currently have this setup on 5 dedicated servers and wish to consolidate these.

All virtual machines will be running centos5.5 and will require live migration in event of a hardware node failure.

Thanks in advance.

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5 Answers 5

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Ganeti is great for this kind of setup.

http://code.google.com/p/ganeti/

Works with Xen and KVM, replicates the disks via drbd. No need for external shared storage.

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  • Hi. Thanks for this info. Ive looked into ganeti a number of times. However never been able to get a centos instance up and running! Any pointers/advise/info you could point me in the right direction?!
    – davidcollom
    Mar 30, 2011 at 21:57
  • I've never tried with a RH derivative, but if you set up your initial instance with --no-start --no-install you'll end up with a bare VM. Then start it with the -H boot_order=cdrom,cdrom_image_path=/path/to/iso and connect via VNC. You should be able to do a normal CD-based install of CentOS.
    – Insyte
    Mar 31, 2011 at 15:06
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I recently setup Ganeti with a CentOS 6.2 guest server. Ganeti provides both high availability and live migration, however, does not provide automatic failover. One must issue the failover command onto one of the nodes in the cluster to failover the guest to another node. It is one command, but it is not automatic. Ganeti doesn't currently support automatic failover. I am currently researching possible solutions to automatically failover my Ganeti nodes. So far, I've read that Heartbeat and Pacemaker are not viable options due to the way they handle DRBD replication (Ganeti manages all DRBD replication as stands, so it would be a conflict of interest).

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RHEV provides all of this and much more. It's free to try for 2 months, and you can always go for the upstream project at ovirt.org

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I use Heartbeat + Pacemaker in CRM mode, running on OpenSuSE 11.3 to do this. Storage for the virtual machines is provided via an iSCSI SAN LUN, managed with LVM. I have two volume groups, one for domU storage, the other for service data storage. Since I am not running a cluster aware file system, the cluster is "active-passive"; I can only have a virtual machine running on one node at a time.

With this setup I am able to have failover capability, in case a cluster node goes down, and am also able to have live-migration capability, should I wish to switch my virtual machines to a different node.

I haven't tried any other virtualization platforms, but you should be able to do what you want with any of them. The "magic" really happens with the cluster software, of which I've also not used anything other than Heartbeat+Pacemaker.

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I believe that xen cloud platform can do this now as well in the latest version. I use it right now in my Dev environment. For the iscsi san we will be using solaris 10 with iscsi luns being handed to the xcp servers. This hopefully should be going into production in the next couple of months.

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  • Hi. Thanks for the input. Looking at xcp docs/wiki I noticed they currently don't support high availability and live migration. Unless you have any installation guides or ideas re this it may be a good contender! Loved some of the 3rd party management systems available.
    – davidcollom
    Mar 30, 2011 at 22:14

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