PVE, synchronous storage and a VDI infrastructure on two physical machines

[sherminator]

Hi everybody,

our company tinkers with the idea of taking our about 55 client PCs (Windows XP at the moment, and Windows 7 very soon) into some kind of virtual desktop infrastructure. Since about three years we do server virtualization with VMware ESX as hypervisor and DataCore SAN-Synphomy-V as storage virtualization (two physical machines each). Our IT service provider now suggests solutions from VMware (Horizon, Mirage, ...) and/or Citrix (XenDesktop, XenApp, ...) - of course, because it seems to be very expensive and very vendor lock-in.

Because I like the Proxmox VE project very much (and use it since about two years) I think about implementing some VDI infrastructure with Proxmox VE and SPICE. And because the infrastructure described above is about three years old, maybe this would be a nice chance to get rid of VMware and DataCore!

So there are three projects in which I would like to ask you for your opinion:

1. Two big physical machines should work in a cluster where server and desktop virtualization is possible. And the storage must be "real time" redundant and with good database performance. So what do you think about a two host PVE cluster with DRBD as storage (hardware RAID controller with many disks, maybe SSDs) and two 8 GBit fibrechannel lanes as direct connection (or rather via two FC switches) between the machines for syncing the storage? This would be fine because the physical machines are located in two different buildings, and our fibrechannel patchpanel has got two free ports left.

2. VDI with the template and cloning features of PVE, and remote access from tiny Linux clients using SPICE.

3. Some kind of application virtualization or "app streaming" like XenApp - open source would be nice, but that's not mandatory. Maybe not for the "big deployment", but for a few little applications which shouldn't be in a template.


I'd be thankful for your opinions, hints or experiences about these thoughts.


Thanks a lot and many greets from Germany
Stephan

 

[e100]

DRBD works great, create two DRBD volumes, one volume for the VMs that primarily run on node A and another volume for VMs that primarily run on node B. This makes split-brain recovery easy.
I have some Windows 2008 R2 machines running SQL 2008 on top of DRBD that is replicated using 10G Infiniband. With a good RAID card and SSD disks, IO performance is good.

You will need to define what network proxmox uses, I suggest you use the same as your fiber to make live migration much faster.
You mention fiber channel, not sure if Proxmox or DRBD could work over fiber channel but fiber ethernet would certanly be ok

For proxmox cluster you really should have at least three nodes to have proper quorum.
If the link between the two datacenters is ever broken you will loose quorum on one or both sides which will prevent you from managing things. Without quorum you cannot even start a VM.

Regarding VDI and app streaming, that it ouside of my expertise hopefully someone else can help answer those questions.

 

[sherminator]

Hi e100,

DRBD works great

thanks a lot for this statement - so I'm not totally wrong with thinking about DRBD, Hardware-RAID-Controller and some fast disks behind.

For proxmox cluster you really should have at least three nodes to have proper quorum.

Yes, I heard about it many times - I think now it's time for me to deal with some cluster-specific technologies - quorum and fencing seem to be important topics...
For testing purposes I'm going to start with some little hardware and these how-tos: http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Two-Node_High_Availability_Cluster, http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/DRBD

I'm happy to read more opinions and experiences, maybe about SPICE: Is there a thinclient with a small linux and some SPICE-viewer out there? I'm thinking about a tiny Debian. Do you have experiences using a Windows 7 via SPICE?

Thanks a lot and many greets
Stephan

 

[Raymond Burns]

I am desperately trying to implement the same thing by PXE booting Clients to load directly into SPICE viewers. I'm failing horribly though.
I can't even find a good Distro to use for my PXE machines. I need something very light as it will only need to run Virt Viewer succesfully.
If I can find a good distro, I should be able to use the bash script to load directly into Virt Viewer full screen without an exit. Furthermore, Linux virt viewer allows for the client USB to passthrough!!
This setup should allow you to duplicate the PXE image, change the VM number in the bash, and then you are good to go. No real deployment necessary.
All of your Windows 7 VM can work from a single template.

 

[mir]

Do you know PuppyLinux?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkDYveZZkp8
http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview and Getting Started.htm
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bkMJ-2wjAAC8HVZZTZBFxBELbojoGctLMg27KazqvRw/edit?hl=en&pli=1#

 

[Raymond Burns]

Thought about PuppyLinux, but there is no Virt-Viewer available in the package manager for PuppyLinux.
Google showed no resources for Virt-Viewer and PuppyLinux

 

[Milkwyrm]

how about Ubuntu 13.10 (virt-viewer 0.56). remove all the apps you dont need and then use it as a template for your own installer?
check out tuxboot http://tuxboot.org/download/ for creating your own ISO. (there is also ubuntu-builder, but it doesnt support 13.10 yet that I'm aware of).

 

[mir]

PuppyLinux shares libraries with Ubuntu 12.04 so you should be able to compile virtviewer yourself.

 

[giulian]

Hi can you explain me, how you can connect directly to a VM in a proxmox by spice protocol ?

I want build thin client and when my user clic on SPice Agent he is connect directly to VM i choose for him.

 

[mir]

I have written a small perl client which you are welcome to extend.

spice-cli
Missing host, password, and username
    Usage spice-cli --host|-h host --username|-u username
                    --password|-p password
		    [--debug] [--help|-?] [--all|-a] [action]
    action: list | term id
	    list	List nodes in cluster
	    id      vmid
	    term    Open spice terminal on 'id'
    --all:  List all VM's. Default is to list running VM's.

 

[giulian]

How i can help you im not a developper you want i do a test of you re client ?

 

[mir]

You can get it here: http://ftp.datanom.net/pve/spice-cli.zip

 

[wahmed]

Lubuntu works great with SPICE. It is stripdown Ubuntu with great support for virt-viewer. It actually works. A set of my clients uses Lubuntu as their desktop PC to access Windows Remote Desktops and Linux desktops using RDS Clients(remmina) and Virt-Viewer for SPICE.