Hardware RAID card compatibility

[mylesw]

Hi there, first post on these forums, so please be kind....

We are about to begin testing Proxmox VE as an alternative to VMWare ESXi for colocated servers. All of our current colo servers are running VMWare ESXi 3.5 or 4.1 and working fine. But I'm looking to send some boxes to a remote data center that is in another state, and I need a solution that is free and open source, but can handle VM migration easily between these boxes. I believe Proxmox is the answer for this.

All of our virtual servers are CentOS. Most don't have a huge memory footprint (1-2GB max typically) but need a lot of disk storage. I know that VMWare ESXi has a max datastore size of 2TB per VM. Is this also the case with Proxmox VE?

Also I'm trying to order hardware for this, and I'd like to have RAID 5 in the 1U server. My hardware supplier is trying to recommend LSI RAID cards for this, that can support 2TB drives (we'd do 4 drive space with 3 allocated to the RAID array and 1 hot spare). Does anyone know if there are any hardware compatibility issues with LSI RAID cards and Proxmox that I should know about in advance?

And if anyone has any tips for configuration of such a box, I'm all ears. As I said, I'm new to Proxmox, but an 'old hand' with VMWare. I just can't afford the VMotion licensing costs with VMWare, so this is a no-brainer from a financial point of view for us. Just want to make sure that its all hardware compatible as well

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Myles

 

[tom]

Do you plan to run centos as KVM or as OpenVZ container? In the case you do not know OpenVZ, take a look on their project pages. http://wiki.openvz.org/

What kind of storage do want to use? Do you need live migration or is off line migration ok? VMotion also needs a SAN, correct me if I am wrong.

 

[mylesw]

Do you plan to run centos as KVM or as OpenVZ container? In the case you do not know OpenVZ, take a look on their project pages. http://wiki.openvz.org/

I'm really open on that. Either would be fine. I'm thinking that OpenVZ is probably better suited for CentOS from what I've read. I checked OpenVZ's hardware compatibility, and it looks like its fine with the LSI RAID cards we are looking at.

What kind of storage do want to use? Do you need live migration or is off line migration ok? VMotion also needs a SAN, correct me if I am wrong.

We have an iSCSI based SAN in our main data center and all VMWare machines are connected to it via a dedicated SAN network run. We don't use (can't afford) VMotion right now, so I'm not sure of the physical requirements for it, but I think we are probably covered for this.

Basically what I need is to be able to migrate a virtual machine in case of disaster. So offline is probably fine for this. Online would be a bonus though.

Myles

 

[tom]

Centos is well supported on OpenVZ, or more detailed - its their primary stable platform (I mean RHEL5). but if you are not familar with OpenVZ it will take some time to get in. But you will love it at the end.

OpenVZ uses local storage and support live migration out of the box. So you just need to install two Proxmox VE boxes (use the stable OpenVZ 2.6.18 kernel branch, rhel5 based kernel), create the cluster with pveca and you can live migrate Centos containers between them via our GUI.

If you have a lot of data it take some time depending on your hardware/network (it basically does several rsyncs in the background) but the container is always on - no downtime. and no complicated setup.

Do we talk here about new centos installations or do you plan to migrate them from VMware? in this case it could be easier to go for KVM - take a look on our migration page - http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Migration_of_servers_to_Proxmox_VE