Sunday 7 June 2009 - Planning for demo grid setup
We are trying to determine the best way to have a larger set of public services - more nodes, and a demonstration of ideas like the High Availability Grid, an attempt to make a redundant and failproof environment that still maximizes the utility of the attached resources and can be flexibly reconfigured on the fly. Most of the following are things that we have already protyped and tested, but haven't been available through our public portals. Things we'd like to implement (perhaps not all at once):
A high availability configuration of resources using about 6-8 functional nodes divided between 2-3 physical machines.
On-demand temporary single VMs
"The proving grounds" - a combination of both of the above, but with the intention of stability and stress testing for various multimachine configurations.The only way to test 'failproofing' is to force failures and test the ability of the systems to recover.
We've been doing some testing of VMware server in addition to our normal Qemu/9vx/p9p based setups. We prefer free open source personally, but some people prefer to VMware to qemu so we may begin providing vmware .vmdk images as well as Qemu qcow2s. For anyone who wants to try using vmware now, it is possible to use qemu-img convert to make a vmdk from a .qcow2, but there were a few additional adjustments we needed to make for best results, notably recompiling the included pccpuf kernel.