olivetalks

In my company we’ve got a few Linux servers. They range from 3 year old machines with 1 GB of RAM to a fresh “monster” with 4 GB of RAM, Quad-Core CPU and external disk array. The servers provide multiple functions for about 20 people, mostly R&D engineers. The current setup mostly works but there’s little redundancy in the system and taking even one server down for any long maintenance is impossible. Because of that the system has accumulated a bit of “cruft” over the years – mostly in the form of different versions of OS and applications – which makes future maintenance require even more effort. I want to Xenify this setup by transferring most or even all the services to Xen guests. The guests could then be migrated from one physical host to another as required. This way it would be possible to perform maintenance on any physical server without disturbing the availability of any service. Basically I’m looking for a way to employ Xen as a method to increase availability and simplify maintenance.

I think I should start with a redundant file system to be free from depending on the 100% availability of a file server. The redundant file system should possibly be clustered so extra redundancy can be provided for the services and load balancing where necessary.

I’m not sure how to go about it in an efficient way. I’d like to hear from anybody who’s done something like this before and is willing to share their experiences.