systec.blogsite.org

Today we got our new two hardware blade servers for our  OpenVZ farm. Currently we have 106 containers running and calculate that we will close this year with about 120. For your information: we started with about 75 containers this year.

I think we could have a little party at the end of this year beacause a raise by 50 containers in one year isn’t bad.

Oh I forgot to mention, we buyed HP BL460cG6 servers. Some infos about it: 2 QuadCore 2,56 Ghz; 48 GB 1300 Ram, 300GB 10k SAS disk and some aditional parameters like FC adapter…

Mario

First – all systems are up and running! It is always exciting to make changes in productive environments because testing in a test environment is a bit “sterile” or “artificial”.

The resize operations on VMWare were straight forward as always but it took some time to backup the virtual harddrives before.

The really interesting thing was to shrink the ext3 partition on one of our OpenVZ servers, lvreduce the LVM logical volume, grow the ext3 to the maximum of the resized LVM logical volume and to implement DRBD for productive usage between to hot servers. Result: perfect! I decided to push up the syncer rate of DRBD (default 240K/sec.) to 20M/sec. The initial primary/secondary sync took about 30 minutes (20 G device).

Today the status is that the DRBD devices are in sync and the nighly reboot of the servers had no impact. I think I will make a little .deb package today for my management scripts of the OpenVZ containers (stratup). After that time is coming to copy our loadbalancer into the DRBD…..

Mario

Today I found the time to write a documentation (in German language for our work) about DRBD, a network (block device) based RAID 1 system. My target is finding a way to use normal LVM based devices and DRBD based devices in synergy on one host. Why? We have the requirement to build some containers fail save but not all. This means that we have an important central Apache based load balancer an some Tomcat based application server which we like to be online mirrored to another OpenVZ hardware node and if it is possible we will try to mirror over WAN from Austria to Germany.

I guess we will update the existing DRBD-OpenVZ wiki page which is a little bit outdated. Maybe I think we will contact Werner Fischer who we knew from the LinuxTag09 and who is the author of the wiki page.

In fact I learned a lot today and I also tested some scenarios (split brain, switch over,…) that make me think positive that it could work.

Stay tuned because I will post the translated documentation (German -> English) from our workplace at http://systec.blogsite.org/wiki.

Mario

Today i “worked” for the first time with git. OK, working with it is a little bit immoderate . I simply checked out (git clone) some code from http://git.openvz.org/pub, this is the public repository from OpenVZ. I wanted to play  a bit around with it and tried this and those… funny. I also come in touch with the GNU automake utils – interesting – a little bit like voodoo.

At work we do some automated tasks, like running (vzctl exec) a command in all VPS servers on one host, with perl parsing and scripting. I think it would be an idea to integrate something in the official main-branch – like vzctl -a exec?

Mario

Today Boernie and I submitted our first article for http://wiki.openvz.org . You could have a look at it under http://wiki.openvz.org/A_managed_OpenVZ_installation

Maybe we will make some more documentations …. Meanwhile we are still active on the board http://forum.openvz.org.

Mario

Today we installed a MediaWiki wiki under http://systec.blogsite.org/wiki. We would like to transfer our static pages to this wiki and try to post more documents. Currently we are writing a wiki article on http://wiki.openvz.org.

This article will cover different software in connection with OpenVZ to show how we could manage a (in our opinion) huge farm of servers with two people.

Stay tuned – Mario

Today we had a lot of discussions with different contents. All about organisation of different processes. A lot of talk…

But today we have also started with the installation of two “new” OpenVZ servers. Oh, they aren’t “new” in the meaning of high sophisticated hardware. They are new for us because they have 16GB ram and a fibre channel interface. which is really useful for us.

I am documenting the installation because I would like to post it on wiki.openvz.org and/or blog.openvz.org. We think it would be interesting for everybody who is using OpenVZ to know how we are managing our installations.

First facts: We are using Debian preseed, APT-Proxy, our own “add on” repository and Puppet. Well stay tuned!

Mario

As introduced on the blog.openvz.org site Boernie and I decided to help “curx” with the questions posted in the German part of the official OpenVZ forum. I think, if there are more people looking on the post, more people will come and ask a question. Really interesting stuff on the board.

Personal I hope that we have enough time to stay on the board – we will see.

Mario

Nice post on the OpenVZ blog (posted by Kir Kolyshkin) – Thanks!

Like last year, we are goining to the Linux Tag 09 next week. We will travel from Spittal to Vienna by car to catch the plane to Berlin. Yes this sounds a little bit crappy but so the tickes are much cheaper. The journey starts on Tuesday afternoon. Our flight to Berlin take off from Vienna at 21:30. Currently we are in contact with Kir Kolyshkin – the OpenVZ project manager!

I will try to make some picures from the atmosphere and maybe some videos. Stay tuned, because we have a little surprise for you related to OpenVZ and Kir!