In times of economical troubles, a small company needs to look for money-saving ideas and use them to take their infrastructure to a less costly setup with the same (or at least nearly) power and possibilities.
For that reason, over the last 2 years we were looking into both energy efficient hardware and virtualization solutions to get the most out of our machines in the datacenter. Every single Ampère costs us a lot of money every month. To save energy, we fitted our backupservers with Western Digital Green Power drives instead of the standard Raid Editions we had before, as we did have to expand the Raid volume anyway.
Another way of reducing the power needs is virtualization some of the separate machines, so the total of our servers could be scaled down a little.
We had a couple of servers used for web- and ftp traffic, which weren’t utilized 100%, not even 25%…
After an inside testing setup with OpenVZ, a container based Linux virtualization solution, we looked into expanding it onto our datacenter installations. The big problem here was the VLAN setup we use in the datacenter, to separate all client networks. Apparently OpenVZ doesn’t really cope well with VLAN’s, or at least there is not that much info about the usage and configuration of setting up containers in separate VLAN’s.
Looking into GUI-possibilities, web based management options for OpenVZ, we stumbled upon Proxmox VE which is an all-in-one distribution, supporting OpenVZ, KVM etc as virtualization options, and which has a nice and full-featured web based management console.
Setting up machines in Proxmox is really easy. You can choose which virtualization environment you want to use (KVM or OpenVZ containers). KVM allows you to run different OS’es next to each other, like Windows servers, BSD etc, while OpenVZ uses the same basic kernel, but allows the containers to be run independently, giving a very low overhead, and maximum performance.
OpenVZ containers are ‘template based’, and Proxmox has a list of already defined and downloadable templates like Debian 4, 5 and 6, Ubuntu 8.04, their own Proxmox email security suite (I think you need a license for this), but also predefined WordPress, Drupal, Zenoss monitoring, Joomla, Mediawiki, …
You can download the ones you need or want to deploy, and a couple of minutes later, the template is ready to be used (depending on your internet connection speed, off course)
Once you have one or more templates, defining a container’ed machine is easy as hell: Create a new ‘machine’, choose OpenVZ as the type, select the template, define a root password for accessing the machine, and select network, disk space etc… When clicking the create button, Proxmox will set up your environment, which will be ready for use in minutes.
VLAN integration with the Proxmox web console is really easy: all you need to do is define extra interfaces as ethx.yyyy where x is the ethernet interface number, and yyyy is your VLAN ID.
Once those were all set, we could define a container, and assign a vmbr bridged network connection to it, which holds the VLAN tag info.
We migrated 4 ftp and webservers in a matter of hours instead of days. Most of the time went into syncing the data between the old and the new machines.
An extra option in Proxmox is defining separate storage possibilities, for example local storage, iSCSI, NFS, … for (automated) backup and snapshot storage…
Proxmox hosts can be ‘joined’ into a cluster, so you can migrate containers between hosts, without downtime, interruption, big troubles or manual intervention. That way you can move machines needing more memory, or migrate to heavier hardware, perform hardware maintenance and have the most important machine run on a backup host server, without the long-time interruptions, and stress accompanied with such a migration or maintenance.
Proxmox is, for Linux virtualization, my favorite now, far above any other solution we have been using in the past.
