[Cialug] VMs & Replication

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 12:19 PM, Matthew Steven <matthew at geniusweb.com>wrote:

> Lee,
>
> I set up a number of HA hosting environment with geographically separated
> machines using VMs, trying to keep it as simple/cheap as possible.
>
> My VM software choice has been xen, with VMs on LVM2 volumes. Good
> performance, though you may need to do some hacking to set xen up in some
> distros nowadays.


As an Ubuntu user, I've found the easiest way for me to get this working is
to install Debian in my Dom0. I've heard the latest versions of Ubuntu are a
little easier (I'm still using 8.04 LTS for most of my servers). The
preference in the Ubuntu world is towards KVM which I've never used on a
server.

Matt, you take the snapshots outside of the VM? Doesn't that cause potential
for consistency problems?

Lee, I know everyone hates it when people ask if you're sure you really want
what you say you want, but is OS level replication the best choice for you?
(i.e. filesystem snapshots) For example, if I have a file server I might
replicate to S3 or Walrus or use rsync at regular intervals. If I was
hosting a database I might do frequent SQL dumps or set up replication.

Maybe I'm a bit old fashioned but the fears of consistency problems would
cause me hesitation. For example, will a database run properly after restore
if the snapshot occurred during a write?

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, identi.ca and twitter

"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." -Benjamin Franklin
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