I recently replaced a couple of servers within a friends business with an oVirt virtualisation setup, I’m really pleased with the whole configuration which consists of a single engine host and 2 hypervisor nodes, the storage is shared over the 2 hosts with glusterfs. The guests which run on the platform replace the services that ran separately on a couple of physical servers, LAMP stack for intranet, Asterisk PBX, postfix/dovecot mailserver, squid proxy cache, Bind DNS, and DHCP server.

After one of my LUG colleagues mentioning about the BigV service from Bytemark I just had to try it. So today I prized open the wallet and set myself up an account.

For £10+VAT per month you get a VM, it comes with 25gb HD space, 1GiB RAM, 1CPU (2.2ghz AMD it seems)  and 200gb bandwidth per month. All seems pretty reasonable. Their software is a breeze to use, and being command line driven its my kind of thing. The underlying tech is KVM/QEMU, and I’m guessing some kind of openstack(y) type goodness, as you can spin up a VM from their selection of images or connect your own ISO.

Here’s a (very) quick howto showing how to get GlusterFS up and running on Fedora. Its probably better situated on a distro like CentOS/RHEL, Ubuntu Server LTS or Debian stable but where’s the fun in knowing it won’t break? Most of these commands are transferrable to other distros though, its Fedora centric due to the use of yum, selinux and systemd (systemctl).

Pre-requisites: 2x (or more) servers running Fedora, I used 18 in this example but i’m sure it shouldn’t change a great deal for newer releases. If it does I’ll try update this doc. The idea behind this setup is to use 2 servers as hypervisors (KVM) and have local storage but reslience, I won’t be covering the virtualisation side, purely storage so VM’s will be adequate for this setup.

Well I finally got there, after a bout of illness causing me to postpone the talk, I finally delivered it last night.

The equipment performed flawlessly, thankfully.. After my asterisk talk you’d think I’d learn to turn off DNS lookups in SSH though.

The only downside was that when I ran through the talk I was installing packages so was actually tight on time, didn’t think about the fact they were already installed so I finished a good 20 mins early. Would have given me time to talk about something I really wanted to include, GlusterFS.

So this coming Monday will be the 2 year anniversary of the Rossendale Linux User Group, not too shabby really. Not marking the occasion or anything but I’m going to be running a talk/demo on virtualisation under Linux. Seems to be the pet project I’ve worked on the most so have a fairly polished setup to talk about. But why make it easy on myself? I normally use CentOS for server builds but just for a change, as it seems to be the way I’m heading, I decided to give Ubuntu a shot.