Xen, application servers and going forward

Jason Taylor jmtaylor90 at gmail.com
Tue Apr 3 17:31:18 UTC 2007


On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 12:03 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> I'm working on getting our first production xen instance up and running 
> for things like koji, smolt, bodhi and the package database.  Here are 
> some guidelines I'd like to put on the wiki as well as some changes I'd 
> like to make.
> 
> 
> 1) xen dom0 - RHEL5 (its just a black box, lets set it up and forget 
> about it)

> 2) after we update our RHEL4 boxes to RHEL5 We will maintain two types 
> of servers, RHEL5 and FC6 (this is because not all required packages are 
> in EPEL, and ultimately the FC6 boxes will probably become FC7,8,9 
> boxes.  I'd like to keep just two types so we can create an appa[1-9] 
> and an appb[1-9].  I'd like to put appa and appb behind a vip that gets 
> balanced 1-9 RR.  This will allow us to choose where we want to put our 
> apps, stable environments vs cutting edge.

this makes a lot of sense and would help ease admin/maintenance tasks.


> 3) test and production xen guests will exist only on test and production 
> xen hosts.  (basically no mixing of production and test).  Obviously 
> emergencies are one thing but in general this is just for organizational 
> purposes and because we may create a test network later and they won't 
> be able to mix.

production and test *should* never mix :) bad things tend to happen and
tracking the cause down gets waaay complicated.

> 4) xen instances will be named by hostname.  Naming by purpose is 
> getting confusing.

less confusion is good, if this is what does it.. 

> 5) We will probably start mixing hardware.  Unlike before where we had 
> builder hardware and app hardware, we'll be bluring this line as the 
> need requires.  I plan on building out a few more wiki instances before 
> the F7 release.
> 6) Kickstarts - I'm working on a xen-host and xen-guest kickstart 
> script.  All of our boxes will be based off of one of these two scripts 
> (they'll be sent to the list soon for examination / suggestions).  
> Beyond that configuration will happen with puppet.  Note: puppet can 
> pull in config files, install packages and restart services.
> 7) Monitoring - I'm working on a monitoring piece (basically a web page) 
> that will list exactly what xen guests are running on what xen hosts, if 
> they are pingable, etc.

good ideas, on a side note just curious how do updates get pulled/pushed
once the servers and apps are in place?


-Jason
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