We have a small cluster of Xen servers in the office. Each virtual machine system image is on its own block device on our iSCSI SAN. The servers all connect their iSCSI initiator to every VM LUN simultaneously.
To prevent the same VM from being started on multiple hosts we just ensure that each virtual machine is only added to one server through the use of xm new
. Judicious monitoring of all the servers through virt-manager
helps as well. However, there really there are no safeguards that would prevent someone from accidentally launching the same VM on multiple hosts.
My question is, what would be a good way to implement a better management system for a setup like this? Are there any existing tools that will manage a Xen setup like this with a shared storage back-end?
We're using openSUSE 11.1 as the host OS.