Posts Tagged ‘cluster’
April 20th, 2009 | 
Author: In this post I am going to talk about a very particular piece of hardware, unique on the market at this moment and that should be very useful for virtualization or clustering purpose, with a very low budget.
This product is called DamVirtualOne.
DamVirtualOne is a modular server (not a Blade) and have some very interesting feature :
- Fully redundant hot swap power supply.
- Fully redundant hot swap Gigabit ethernet switches with failover.
- Fully redundant hot swap storage controller, with multipathing and failover support.
- Up to six (6) compute module double socket (for Intel Xeon 5400 or 5500 CPU family).
- Up to 96GB of RAM each compute module.
- Up to 14 HDD SAS.
- Up to two redundant external SAS connection to storage expansion or SAS device connection (i.e. Tape Unit).
But the more important things that lead me to write this post is that storage is shared between the compute module, but not as other Blade Server on the market right now, with DamVirtualOne you should create a Virtual Disk (similar to a SAN LUN) and share it between all compute module if you need it.
At this time only IBM Blade Center S should have the same possibility, but it’s a Blade server, not a modular server, and there is a big price difference.
I had the luck to test the DamVirtualOne for few days (a lot) and I’ve installed the following :
- VMware ESXi 3.5
- VMware ESX 3.5
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008
I’ve created some fully function, and very performance VMware HA and DRS Cluster, and some Linux Cluster based on RHEL, and a large number of my previous post was written based on the installation above.
The standard server virtualization or clustering best practices require shared storage to use all benefits of the technology and this lead to buy SAN, Storage array (tipically Fibre Channel) who is very expensive, difficult to maintain and create a very complex infrastructure.
So you should know why I’m so excited about DamVirtualOne, because it’s a “single package” that contains all things you need for virtualization or clustering purpose : servers, storage and network a real datacenter all in one.
With the maximum configuration this machine should support up tp two hundred (200) Virtual Machine !! And his price will be very similar to two or three phisical server (as you are useful to see) and a shared storage, so you should understand that is a beautiful “piece of iron”.
I truly believe that modular server is sometimes under valuated, but in my opinion there is an enormous potential in it and it will be beautiful if this post lead some people to find out a solution, cheaper than other more famous one, using this piece of technology.
You should found more details about DamVirtualOne at the following websites.
Feel free to ask, they will answer you !
Riccardo
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This article assume you have two system with RHEL 5.2 X86_64 installed and you want to create a cluster to have High Availability for some services (in this article Apache Web Server).
This article also assume that you have a shared storage accessible from the two system, as for example a Storage Area Network (SAN) Fibre Channel oer iSCSI and you have free space on it.
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Investigating to deploy an MSCS on VMWare VI3 I’ve finally found that :
Virtual Machine (Cluster Node) have forementioned boundaries
- Only LSI Logic virtual SCSI Card
- Only VMXnet
- Only 32-Bit VMs
- 2-Node Clustering only
- Nic teaming is not supported
- iSCSI clustering is not supported
- Boot from SAN is not supported
- VMs part of clustering cannot be part of VMHA & DRS
- Cannot VMotion on VMs using clustering software
- ESX 2.5 and ESX 3.0 is not supported
- Different HBA’s card manufacturer not supported
- When using N+I SCSIPort Miniport driver must be present on Physical Node and not Storport Miniport driver, also there must be no powerpath software installed on physical node.
Take care of this.
Riccardo
