[Xen-users] Re: Input from xen hosting providers?

[Brandon Lamb <brandonlamb@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 7:34 PM, Brandon Lamb <brandonlamb@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> This is my second mail because the first one turned into a two page novel.
>
> Basically my question is this, what is your opinion on the following,
> in regards to having to know about the os and USE in your hosting
> environtment. Here is my problem...
>
> We have a sales guy that sold people on the idea of having 4 windows
> clients, and 2 "filestore" servers. filestore1 backs up to filestore2
> so that if filestore1 fails, they can move over. Okay that is fine
> right. But now my boss wants me to be able to keep track and manage
> what these guests FUNCTION AS. ie he wants to be able to allow a
> customer to tell us to have filestore1 on one physical xen machine,
> and filestore2 on another physical xen machine. This way if one
> physical box dies they can still operate on filestore2 on the other
> box.
>
> My problem with this is being asked to MANAGE these guests, and having
> to know which guests can run where. I just want to tell a customer
> here is your memory and disk space, here is windows installed. Thats
> IT. We already concluded we did not want to be involved in the IT
> aspect of running virtual servers. Now for us to take this track seems
> like we now would have to take on the IT architecture design as well.
> I REALLY dont want to give a rip what the guests are running or how
> their os/it level applications are setup.
>
> Does that make sense? Looking for some help here. Im not really into
> having to build and keep a spreadsheet of guest2-1 needs to be on
> xen1, guest2-2 needs to be on xen2. Oh guest2-2 died uhhh cant move it
> to xen1 so have to move to xen3, oh xen3 doesnt have enough resources
> DAMN.

I also cant seem to get the point across that, ok if clients1-4 and
fileserver1 are on xen1, and filestore2 are on xen2 and then xen1
physical box dies, theres NO point in splitting where filestore1 and 2
are because theres no clients to access filestore2 anway!

Part of this huge argument was the salesman selling clients on "if
your first datastore fails i can set your clients to use your second
one" but didnt really think this out at the physical box level.

Another discussion/argument is on hot spares. It seems to me a total
waste to have to basically buy a new server twice, because for every
server there would be a hot spare ready to go if the primary failed
for every physical box. I would much prefer the cloud type model where
if xen2 failed, i would just use my backup server to bring whatever
guests were running up on other boxes that had free resources.

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xensource.com/xen-users