Regarding power management, if you get DRAC (Enterprise or Basic, not sure) you should be able to do out-of-band power management.
If you're going to spend the money for three R620's with 128 GB of RAM each and dual cpu's, you might be a little better off with a 2nd root HDD for redundancy. -----Original Message----- From: users-boun...@ovirt.org [mailto:users-boun...@ovirt.org] On Behalf Of Jason Keltz Sent: Tuesday, October 08, 2013 9:44 AM To: Itamar Heim Cc: users@ovirt.org Subject: Re: [Users] new oVirt installation recommendations On 10/07/2013 02:35 PM, Itamar Heim wrote: > On 10/07/2013 06:13 PM, Jason Keltz wrote: >> I've been experimenting with oVirt 3.2 on some old hardware, and am >> now preparing to buy new hardware for using oVirt 3.3 in production. >> I'm interested in any feedback about what I plan to purchase. I want >> to keep the setup as simple as possible. Our current environment >> consists of mostly CentOS 6.4 systems. >> >> The combined oVirt engine and file server will be a Dell R720 with dual >> Xeon E5-2660 and 64 GB of memory. The server would have an LSI 9207-8i >> HBA connected to the SAS backplane. The R720 enclosure has 16 x 2.5" >> disk slots. I would get 2 x 500 GB NLSAS drives for mirrored md rood >> (raid1), use 12 slots for RAID10 SAS 10K rpm drives (either 600 GB or >> 900 GB), and have an additional 2 spares. Data storage would be >> virtual machines, and some associated data. The O/S would be CentOS >> 6.4. >> >> The nodes would be 3 x Dell R620, dual Xeon E5-2690, 128 GB memory, >> each with just a single, small NL SAS root drive. There would be no >> other local storage. All VMs would use the file server as the >> datastore. The nodes would run oVirt node. >> >> In terms of networking, each machine would have 4 ports - 2 x 1 Gb >> (bonded) giving machines access to "public" network (that we do not >> control). The 2 x 10 Gb copper would be connected to a locally >> installed copper 10G switch that we fully control - 1 port used for >> storage, and 1 for management/consoles/VM migration. >> >> A few additional notes ... >> >> I chose to stick with software raid MD on the file server, mostly for >> cost, and simplicity. I have a lot of experience good with MD, and >> performance seems reasonable. >> >> I would have gone SSD for the file server root disk, but the cost >> from Dell for their SSD is prohibitive, and I want the whole system >> to be included in the warranty. NLSAS is the cheapest disk that will >> have support for the duration of the warranty period (with Dell >> servers, SATA drives are only warranted for 1 year). >> >> The nodes with 1 NLSAS drive... I've thought about replacing that >> with simply an SD card. It's not clear if this the best solution, or >> how much space I would need on that card. At least when I configure >> via the Dell web site, the biggest SD card it seems I can purchase >> with a server is 2 GB which doesn't seem like very much! I guess people guy >> bigger >> cards separately. I know a disk will work, and give me more than >> enough space and no hassle. >> >> I've chosen to keep the setup simple by using NFS on the file server, >> but I see a whole lot of people here experimenting with the new >> Gluster capabilities in oVirt 3.3. It's not clear if that's being >> used in production, or how reliable that would be. I really can't >> find information on performance tests, etc with Gluster and oVirt, in >> particular, with comparison of NFS and Gluster. Would there be a > > gluster is still not available for centos 6.4, and there are some > issues with snapshots around it still for libgfapi. > for posixfs, its supported since 3.2. > Ok. I guess it's probably best that I stick with NFS for this time around. >> performance advantage to using Gluster here? How would it work? by >> adding disk to the nodes, and getting rid of the file server (or at >> least turning the file server into a smaller engine only server)? >> How would this impact the nodes in terms of their ability to handle VMs? >> (performance?) I presently have no experience with Gluster >> whatsoever, though I'm certainly never against learning something >> new, especially should it benefit my project. Unfortunately, as I'm >> positive everyone can attest for is that it's just trouble finding >> the number of hours in the day :) There's one thing for sure - >> Gluster itself, while maybe not TOO complicated is still more complicated >> than an NFS only setup. > > I don't have details on this, and hope others have. > but you are correct its an entirely different deployment architecture > between a central nfs server, and distributed storage on the nodes. > It would be helpful if the documentation for oVirt had more information on this. >> >> As I've mentioned before, we don't use LDAP for authentication, so >> I'll be restricted to one admin user at the moment unless I setup a >> separate infrastructure for oVirt authentication. That will be fine >> for a little while. I understand that work may be underway for >> pluggable authentication with oVirt. I'm not sure if that ties into >> any of the items on Itamar's list though. Itamar? :) I was hoping to >> see that pluggable authentication model sooner rather than later so >> that I could write something to work with our custom auth system. > > well, you could also launch an openldap/ipa/ad/etc. in a VM. of course > if it has issues you'd need admin@internal to fix it. > I was thinking of doing this if I had to, but it's still a lot of headache for a few logins. Is the pluggable authentication coming in a new version of oVirt? >> >> In terms of power management - my existing machines are using a >> Raritan KVM with Raritan power management dongles and power bars. I >> haven't had an opportunity to see if oVirt can manage the devices, >> but I guess if oVirt can't do it, I can continue to manage power >> through the KVM interface. > > are they supported by fence-agents in centos? > I've never tried. I don't often need to power off hosts the hard way.. a reboot it usually fine. When I do need to power manage hosts, I go into the Raritan KVM, click on the host, and turn it off, and back on, and everything is fine. I haven't done any connection to Linux. >> >> Any feedback would be much appreciated. >> With your experience with oVirt, any feedback on the hardware/NFS server combination? Jason. _______________________________________________ Users mailing list Users@ovirt.org http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/users _______________________________________________ Users mailing list Users@ovirt.org http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/users