Rik Theys wrote:
Hi,

I'm looking into virtualizing some of our servers onto two (or more) physical nodes with either KVM or Xen. What are the 'best practices' for running virtual _servers_ with KVM? Any good/bad experiences with running KVM for virtual servers that have to run for months on end?

I've installed ubuntu 8.04 because it should have KVM as the default virtualization tool and is the only 'enterprise' distribution with kvm right now. I used one host to act as an iSCSI target and installed ubuntu with KVM on two other nodes. I can create a virtual server with virt-manager, but it seems live migration is not (yet) supported by libvirt/virsh? So how are other people running their KVM virtual servers? Do you create a script for each virtual server and invoke kvm directly? How do you do the live migration then? Launch the script with an 'incoming' parameter on the target host, and run the migrate command manually?
If libvirt does not support migration than you'll need to automate it yourself, we use a daemon to exec/migrate VMs. AFAIK, except for libvirt* there is no other free tool for it.
Or is there an other (automated) way? I once tried the live migration on a test host and if I recall correctly, the kvm process kept on running on the source host even after the server was migrated to the target? Is that the expected behaviour?

This is works-as-designed, the idea is that a 3rd party mgmt tool get the result of the migration process and closes one of the source/destination. Without 3rd party, the destination cannot continue the source got end-of-migration message and the opposite on failure.

What type of shared storage is best used with KVM (or Xen for that matter)? Our physical servers will be connected to a SAN. Should I create volumes on my san and export them to my physical servers where I can then use them as /dev/by-id/xxx disk in my KVM configs? Of should I configure my two servers into a GFS cluster and use files as backend for my KVM virtual machines? What are you using as shared storage?

We use NFS and it works pretty well, your proposals are also valid options. Just make sure an image is not accessed in parallel by 2 hosts.
Regards,

Rik


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