Re: [CentOS] Bare metal vs. virtualization: Proxmox + Ceph + CentOS?

2021-03-15 Thread Nicolas Kovacs
Le 15/03/2021 à 13:41, Blaž Bogataj a écrit :
> ProxMox and software defined storage on 4-5 machines I think for us is the
> best solution. In point of maintaining there is no problem with upgrading
> from one release to other - now is version 6.x. Only issue is probably my
> knowledge how to put this together.

Thanks very much for everybody for your input !

Cheers,

Niki

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Re: [CentOS] Bare metal vs. virtualization: Proxmox + Ceph + CentOS?

2021-03-15 Thread Blaž Bogataj
Hello

 

I'm using ProxMox as virtualization, from verson 2.x. For around 20
servers (most of them are Centos machines) for different services (Zimbra,
Apache, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, EDB, ..) and also for MS servers (AD,
Exchange, fileserver, MSSql Express, .). They all are running on 5-6 HW
servers, different brands and all of them are pretty old.

As backup use Synology NAS and nfs with 10gb fc to FC switch. So speed for
backup really is not a problem.

I slowly moving sata disks to ssd, in same hardware and this is really big
advantage in speed. In time of changing disks move virtual machines to
other hypervisors. 

HW Raid5 is really nice with ssd. In 3 years of changing to ssd disks only
one fail, but system running and change of disk without downtime ...

If I want to test, move, . backup and restore is not an issue. For this
year plan is to put one NAS to other location for disaster .

 

ProxMox and software defined storage on 4-5 machines I think for us is the
best solution. In point of maintaining there is no problem with upgrading
from one release to other - now is version 6.x. Only issue is probably my
knowledge how to put this together.

 

All the best

Blaz

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Re: [CentOS] Bare metal vs. virtualization: Proxmox + Ceph + CentOS ?

2021-03-14 Thread Simon Matter
> Am 14.03.21 um 07:13 schrieb Nicolas Kovacs:
>>
>> Now here’s the problem: it took me three and a half days of intense work
>> to
>> restore everything and get everything running again. Three and a half
>> days of
>> downtime is quite a stretch.
>>
>
> What was the real problem? Why did you need days to restore
> from backups? Maybe the new solution is attached here?

I thought the same. What happened to your previous hardware?

First, using RAID1-6 you should not lose your storage so easily. So what
can happen:

a) hardware dies, disks are still fine -> move disks to new hardware and
only adjust settings for new hardware.
b) one disk dies, means no damage but need to replace disk.
c) hardware dies completely with all disks -> new replacement hardware
required.

a and b can usually be handled quite fast, possibly have replacement parts
ready, c really happens almost never, really.

Then, why did it take so long to get up and running again?

One important thing to keep in mind is that trasferring data from a backup
can always take a lot time if there is lot of data involved. Restoring
multiple terabytes usually takes more time than one might expect. At least
me I usually forget that in my daily work and assume things should go fast
with modern hardware. That's not always true with todays storage sizes.

Regards,
Simo

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Re: [CentOS] Bare metal vs. virtualization: Proxmox + Ceph + CentOS ?

2021-03-14 Thread Valeri Galtsev


> On Mar 14, 2021, at 5:42 AM, Leon Fauster via CentOS  
> wrote:
> 
> Am 14.03.21 um 07:13 schrieb Nicolas Kovacs:
>> 
>> Now here’s the problem: it took me three and a half days of intense work to
>> restore everything and get everything running again. Three and a half days of
>> downtime is quite a stretch.
> 
> What was the real problem? Why did you need days to restore
> from backups? Maybe the new solution is attached here?

I would second what Leon said. Even though my backup is different (bareos), 
still my estimate of full restore to different machine would be: installation 
of new system (about 30 min at most), then restore of everything from bareos 
backup, which will depend on total size of everything to restore, the 
bottleneck will be 1 Gbps network connection. And I do not think my FreeBSD 
boxes with dozens of jails are much simpler than Nicolas's front end machine. 
Restore from backup is just restore from backup.

But under some circumstances that can be even faster. I once had quite 
important machine died (system board). But I had different hardware running 
less critical stuff, which accepted the drives from failed machine plus RAID 
card from it, after boot the only thing was necessary to address was network 
configuration (due to different device names). (both boxes have 8 port sata/sas 
backplane, all filesystems of machines live on hardware RAID-6…)

As far as distributed file systems are concerned, they are nice (but with seph 
you will need to have all boxes with the same size of storage). However, it is 
more expensive. Cheaper guy - I - goes with hardware RAID, and spare machine 
(if necessary that is: in a manner of grabbing less important box’s hardware to 
stick drives from failed into it).

Virtualization: in our shop (we use FreeBSD jails), it provides more security 
and flexibility. As far as “disaster recovery” is concerned, using jails 
doesn’t affect it in any way. But often helps to avoid disasters created by 
sudden conflict between packages, as only inseparable components are run in the 
same jail, so actual server is a bunch of jails each running one or two 
services, which gives extra robustness. And if A depends on C and B depends on 
D, and if  C and D conflict with each other, that doesn’t matter when A lives 
in one jail, and B lives in another.

One example of flexibility I just had another week: I migrated the box with 
couple of dozens of jail (most of them are independent servers with different 
IPs, “virtualized” in the manner they run if jails on some machine). To move 
the whole everything to another machine will take long, noticeable downtime, 
but moving jails one at a time made downtime of each as short as mere reboot 
cause. (In general, any sort of virtualization gives you that).

I hope, this helps.

Valeri

> --
> Leon
> 
> 
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Re: [CentOS] Bare metal vs. virtualization: Proxmox + Ceph + CentOS ?

2021-03-14 Thread Mauricio Tavares
How many extra servers can you add to your setup? If I were in your
shoes, I would consider building a file server/NAS with fast
connection to your server(s). Then share the data to your services to
the server (NFS?), export the disk (iscsi) or some combination of
both. I hope someone can correct me but I think postfix has issues
with use accounts in NFS partitions.

Next step is building your web/mail/etc servers -- be them as VMs or
as all in the same baremetal -- as thin as possible so you can recover
that quickly (ansible?), mount data fileshares, and off you go. If you
are going the vm route you could ether save snapshots or build one of
those setups with two servers so in case one goes boink the other
takes over. This is also good for upgrading one of the VM servers: do
them on different days so you can see if there are problems.

If you cannot have more than one server, do run VMs and then put them
in a second set of disks so something happens to boot disk you can
recover.

On Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 1:13 AM Nicolas Kovacs  wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Last week I had a disaster which took me a few unnerving days to repair. My
> main Internet-facing server is a bare-metal installation with CentOS 7. It
> hosts four dozen web sites (or web applications) based on WordPress, Dolibarr,
> OwnCloud, GEPI, and quite a number of mail accounts for ten different domains.
> On sunday afternoon this machine had a hardware failure and proved to be
> unrecoverable.
>
> The good news is, I always have backups of everything. In that case, I have a
> dedicated backup server (in a different datacenter in a different country). 
> I’m
> using Rsnapshot for incremental backups, so I had all data: websites, mail
> accounts, database dumps, configurations, etc.
>
> Now here’s the problem: it took me three and a half days of intense work to
> restore everything and get everything running again. Three and a half days of
> downtime is quite a stretch.
>
> As far as I understand, my mistake was to use a bare-metal installation and 
> not
> a virtualized solution where I could simply restore a snapshot of a VM. 
> Correct
> me if I’m wrong.
>
> Now I’m doing a lot of thinking and searching. Proxmox and Ceph look quite
> promising. From what I can tell, the idea is not to use a big server but a
> cluster of many small servers, and aggregate them like you would do with hard
> disks in a RAID 10 array for example, only you would do this for the whole
> system. And then install one or several CentOS 7 VMs on top of this setup.
>
> Any advice from the pros before I dive head first into the  documentation?
>
> Cheers from the sunny South of France,
>
> Niki
>
> --
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> 7, place de l'église - 30730 Montpezat
> Site : https://www.microlinux.fr
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> Mail : i...@microlinux.fr
> Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
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Re: [CentOS] Bare metal vs. virtualization: Proxmox + Ceph + CentOS ?

2021-03-14 Thread Leon Fauster via CentOS

Am 14.03.21 um 07:13 schrieb Nicolas Kovacs:


Now here’s the problem: it took me three and a half days of intense work to
restore everything and get everything running again. Three and a half days of
downtime is quite a stretch.



What was the real problem? Why did you need days to restore
from backups? Maybe the new solution is attached here?

--
Leon


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