Re: [PLUG] Virtualization clusters & shared storage

[Andy Wojnarek <andy.wojnarek@theatsgroup.com>]

Hey JP,

Are you describing a hyperconverged architecture? Where there is no external storage, and each node in the cluster has local storage. 

The best commercial offering I have come across in that arena, (and have used), is Nutanix (https://www.nutanix.com/).

They grew up as a software defined storage company, and grew into the hyperconverged product you see today.

(Note I don't sell or make any money on Nutanix, or do Nutanix services, I just have used their product and think they're the bees knees of the hyperconverged space).

--
Andy

On 8/8/18, 5:13 PM, "plug on behalf of JP Vossen" <plug-bounces@lists.phillylinux.org on behalf of jp@jpsdomain.org> wrote:

    I have a question about virtualization cluster solutions.  One thing 
    that has always bugged me is that VM vMotion/LiveMigration features 
    require shared storage, which makes sense, but they always seem to 
    assume that shared storage is external, as in a NAS or SAN.  What would 
    be REALLY cool is a system that uses the cluster members "local" storage 
    as JBOD that becomes the shared storage.  Maybe that's how some of 
    solutions work (via Ceph, GlusterFS or ZFS?) and I've missed it, but 
    that seems to me to be a great solution for the lab & SOHO market.
    
    What I mean is, say I have at least 2 nodes in a cluster, though 3+ 
    would be better.  Each node would have at least 2 partitions, one for 
    the OS/Hypervisor/whatever and the other for shared & replicated 
    storage.  The "shared & replicated" partition would be, well, shared & 
    replicated across the cluster, providing shared storage without needing 
    an external NAS/SAN.
    
    This is important to me because we have a lot of hardware sitting around 
    that has a lot of local storage.  It's basically all R710/720/730 with 
    PERC RAID and 6x or 8x drive bays full of 1TB to 4TB drives.  While I 
    *can* allocate some nodes for FreeNAS or something, that increases my 
    required node count and wastes the CPU & RAM in the NAS nodes while also 
    wasting a ton of local storage on the host nodes.  It would be more 
    resource efficient to just use the "local" storage that's already 
    spinning.  The alternative we're using now (that sucks) is that the 
    hypervisors are all just stand-alone with local storage.  I'd rather get 
    all the cluster advantages without the NAS/SAN issues 
    (connectivity/speed, resilience, yet more rack space & boxes).
    
    Are there solutions that work that way and I've just missed it?
    
    
    Related, I'm aware of these virtualization environment tools, any more 
    good ones?
    1. OpenStack, but this is way too complicated and overkill
    2. Proxmox sounds very cool
    3. Cloudstack likewise, except it's Java! :-(
    4. Ganeti was interesting but it looks like it may have stalled out 
    around 2016
    5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVirt except it's Java and too limited
    6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNebula with some Java and might do 
    on-node-shared-storage?
    7. Like AWS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_(software) except 
    it's Java
    
    I'm asking partly for myself to replace my free but not F/OSS ESXi 
    server at home and partly for a work lab that my team needs to rebuild 
    in the next few months.  We have a mishmash right now, much of it ESXi. 
    We have a lot of hardware laying around, but we have *no budget* for 
    licenses for anything.  I know Lee will talk about the VMware starter 
    packs and deals like that but we not only have no budget, that kind of 
    thing is a nightmare politically and procedurally and is a no-go; it's 
    free or nothing.  And yes I know that free costs money in terms of 
    people time, but that's already paid for and while we're already busy, 
    this is something that has to happen.
    
    Also we might like to branch out from ESXi anyway...  We are doing a 
    some work in AWS, but that's not a solution here, though cross cloud 
    tools like Terraform (and Ansible) are in use and the more we can use 
    them here too the better.
    
    Thanks,
    JP
    --  -------------------------------------------------------------------
    JP Vossen, CISSP | http://www.jpsdomain.org/ | http://bashcookbook.com/
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