nixCraft

We are looking at HP blade enclosure and blades for our web server environment, but some of our server are just small service webservers and DNS servers so I would like to VM them on a blade does anyone have any experience working with blades and XEN and what specs are needed to ensure a couple of VMs can be setup on one blade server?


We use SLES 11 for our services.

What kind of features do you want with XEN like Live migration? Most enterprise blade setup are as follows:

1. Central network storage like NFS, NAS or SAN. This make sure when hardware or network fails, traffic get rerouted to new VM with live migration.
2. Hardware or software Load Balancer in front of Apache to sent traffic to different live vms and to manage load for Apache.
3. Usually DB server such as MySQL / Oracle is not loaded in VM as it needs dedicated disk I/O. You can start with RAID-10 based dedicated server. But if you have SAN storage, then feel free to use DB server. It can be load balanced using multiple VMs.
4. Usually backup dns and mail server do not need central storage. So they can work indepently in cloude or single core blade with 1 or 2GB ram. Again depend upon your load and traffic many things can be done here.
5. Software or hardware Firewall in front of blade rack to protect it from sucm of the Internet.

__________________
Vivek Gite
Linux Evangelist
Be proud RHEL user, and let the world know about your enterprise choices! Join RedHat user group.
Always use CODE tags for posting system output and commands!
Do you run a Linux? Let's face it, you need help

1 mysql server
1 mysql failover (master-master)

3 small application webservers (low traffic)

1 large webserver (lots of traffic)
1 large webserver failover

2 dns servers

1 media server (flash media server 3.5)

mail server

File Server (NFS) and (CVS)

Access to a SAN

knock knock anyone

Be specific...

__________________
Vivek Gite
Linux Evangelist
Be proud RHEL user, and let the world know about your enterprise choices! Join RedHat user group.
Always use CODE tags for posting system output and commands!
Do you run a Linux? Let's face it, you need help