Re: HA for Xen

[River Tarnell <river.tarnell%wikimedia.de@localhost>]

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Jean-Yves Migeon:
> What is your intent? Have SCSI disks managed by dom0 (with FC), and
> export them to domUs through a xen block interface?

Yes.  I also want automatic failover in case of node failure (which is the 
reason for using FC -- I understand on Linux DRBD can achieve the same thing, 
but I'm rather wary of that solution).

I looked at Linux-HA heartbeat, which seems to support this, but it still 
requires kernel support (e.g. for SCSI-3 PGR, and to panic the system on 
reservation failure, for I/O fencing) which doesn't seem to exist in NetBSD.  I 
wouldn't mind implementing this, but I'm not sure how much work is actually 
required.

I don't necessarily need NetBSD to be the dom0.  I did look at Citrix 
XenServer, which does everything I need, but it can't run NetBSD as a PV 
guest because of [0].  I imagine it would work as an HVM guest, but I'd rather 
avoid that (my experience of running FreeBSD as an HVM guest is that 
performance is very poor -- I don't know if NetBSD would be any better there).

Perhaps a standard Linux system (CentOS?) would be the best solution, with 
NetBSD as the domU.

What I am specifically trying to avoid is using Linux as the domU operating 
system.  We don't have any Linux here, and I'm not keen on adding it just for 
this.

Thanks,
River.

[0] http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-xen/2010/06/11/msg006085.html

- -- 
River Tarnell                   System administrator, Wikimedia Toolserver
Tel: +44 (0)3333 403633         VoIP: sip:river%tamara.tcx.org.uk@localhost
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