History of 180 VPS

    For the past 6 years, our company has been providing people with dedicated server capacities. Of these, every day we receive a large number of requests of rather unusual content, stories about which I have long wanted to start sharing with you.

    Recently, we were approached by a new client who needed to raise 180 Linux virtual machines as soon as possible according to the template he had prepared. The customer needed a complete control system with a console and control over these UPUs.

    Despite the extensive experience in implementing virtualization solutions, it became clear that this task would require a non-standard approach, because:

    1) Hyper-V 2008, which we usually used, traditionally unpredictably coped with Linux, for example, there were problems with the file system, the machines might not return from reboot, after installing the integration services it became impossible to update the system kernel.

    2) The limit of virtual machines on the same Hyper-V 2008 cluster was almost exhausted by that time:

    image

    As a result, despite the fact that the new cluster based on Hyper-V 2012, in which Microsoft marketers promised to expand the horizons of virtualization far beyond the limits of the possible and impossible, was already on the way, it was decided not to wait for this moment of trepidation for everyone, but to do what many colleagues in the shop had advised us long ago - to raise the KVM hypervisor in order to protect itself as much as possible from most problems with * nixes.

    As the control panel, we chose SolusVM , as an inexpensive, tested and easy-to-use tool with full support.

    The dual-processor Xeon E5630 based on the Supermicro platform was used as iron, with 96 gigabytes of memory and 12 SAS 15K disks of 300 gigabytes each.

    KVM and SolusVM made it possible to create an empty virtual machine for the client as a template, without which we transferred control to the client for configuration. He carried with her about several hours and returned to us, adding to her weight about 10 gigabytes of installed software. After that, migration began.

    At this point, KVM should be praised for the unusually high (after experience with Hyper-V 2008), the speed of cloning virtual machines from templates. Relying on 8 server cores - creating and initializing 4 virtual machines at a time, he spent less than 10 minutes creating each batch, thus creating 24 machines per hour with which we congratulated him safely, retiring to rest home, because it was already night on the street.

    In the morning, everything was ready - 180 established UPUs, requiring careful attention and further work:

    image

    There were some minor difficulties. It was required to set a static IP on each of the prepared machines, for which guestfish was created on the basis of
    script
    guestfish < add-drive / dev / mapper / vps_kvm-kvm279_img
    run
    mount-vfs rw ext4 / dev / vda1 /

    upload - < DEVICE = eth0
    BOOTPROTO = static
    ONBOOT = yes
    IPADDR = 158.255.0.32
    GATEWAY = 158.255.0.1
    NETMASK = 255.255.255.0
    END
    EOF
    clinging to the hard drive of each of them offline to correct the necessary parameters, which coped with its task in just a minute.

    Finally, when it seemed that happiness was just around the corner, new network problems arose - 180 machines interacting within their network without problems were inaccessible from the outside - even ping did not pass. As a result of long dances with tambourines and a firewall, old-timers were able to recall that in the switch used for the task a long time ago, a limit on issuing MAC addresses was set to 20 to protect against spoofing, disabling which we managed to get rid of the last headache and make the client happy during.

    As a result, in just a few hours, 180 virtual machines were successfully deployed. The client himself was satisfied and uses the machines for the second month. We were also satisfied, appreciating the capabilities of the KVM and SolusVM bundle for the Linux platform. The only drawback was the lack of subtle allocation of resources, which we are going to fix using Nexenta , the implementation of which is now in full swing. I will talk about this next week.

    The moral is: SolusVM licenses cost about $ 100, and you get a convenient and simple orchestrator. Assemble and connect the master and slave machine quickly and according to the instructions. Operation and backup are straightforward. At the time of writing, we already have 3 such nodes, 2 in Moscow and one in the Netherlands with full automation of billing and automatic deployment of virtual machines - SolusVM has a simple SOAP API. In a week, we completely screwed everything to billing and our resource management system.

    Happiness and success to all the workers of the server rear in anticipation of the long-awaited holiday,
    Hostkey.

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