Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Xen

Novell also creating a standalone hypervisor

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According to eWEEK, Novell is also busy creating a stand alone hypervisor to enter the XenServer, Hyper-V and ESX(i) battle. It will be Xen based and in my opinion a smart move considering they bought Platespin and already have a management tool called Orchestrator. It’s a shame they are a few years late, they should have bought Xenserver when they had the chance… or even Virtual Iron. Anyway we will just have to wait and see,

Novell Chief Technology Officer Jeff Jaffe hinted at a stand-alone hypervisor product during his keynote address at the BrainShare conference in March, saying one of Novell’s goals was to make SLES 11 available as an appliance that would be supported by a new tool set designed to quickly build specialized images.

Xen HA clustering

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The company I work for, Ictivity, recently started testing with Xen(not Xensource!) and HA clustering. There were two case studies, one based on Suse and one based on Red Hat. Both definitely have it’s own advantages and disadvantages but it seemed promising to me. Today I noticed a blog on ONLamp.com about how to set this up. It’s a good read and gives you insight information. You can do this with open source only software so it will not get any cheaper than this. If this solution is suitable for an enterprise environment is definitely a point of discussion, but it is good to see there are more alternatives coming our way.

The idea of using virtual machines to build high available clusters is not new. Some software companies claim that virtualization is the answer to your HA problems, off course that’s not true. Yes, you can reduce downtime by migrating virtual machines to another physical machine for maintenance purposes or when you think hardware is about to fail, but if an application crashes you still need to make sure another application instance takes over the service. And by the time your hardware fails, it’s usually already too late to initiate the migration. So, for each and every application you still need to look at whether you want to have it constantly available, if you can afford the application to be down for some time, or if your users won’t mind having to relogin when one server fails.