XenServer Shared Local Stage

Question

I am new user of XenServer 6.2. I have multiple servers connected to Pool/Cluster. Each server has 4 HDD with sw raid10.

I would like to make local storage shared because of need quick migration.

What do you recommend to me as shared storage across nodes?

Does XenServer support DRBD 8 or newer? – Nils Oct 01 '13 at 13:19 — Nils, Oct 01 '13 at 13:19
There is no support in XenServer 6.2, only testing in XCP. – Lukáš Viktora Oct 08 '13 at 12:44 — Lukáš Viktora, Oct 08 '13 at 12:44
Is this a test or production environment? – Nils Oct 08 '13 at 13:32 — Nils, Oct 08 '13 at 13:32
The Xen pool would be in production. – Lukáš Viktora Oct 09 '13 at 05:33 — Lukáš Viktora, Oct 09 '13 at 05:33

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 09 '13 at 20:29

With the restricted requirement of local storage, in a production environment and without DRBD I see only a few possibilities left:

NFSv3 use an NFS-export and synchronise that with a local copy of that export

Use the NFS-export as active storage and use your local copy as fallback (a HA-NFS-server would be the proper solution here)

iSCSI You could use iSCSI to export multiple RAW storage devices. Either use a HA-iSCSI-server or build a Raid1 across all your nodes.

The standard-solution would be a classical FC-SAN with redundant storage.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 14 '13 at 11:21

You don't need to share your local storage with other hosts to migrate VMs. XenServer 6.2 supports VM migration without shared storage.

From XenCenter, just right click the VM, select "Migrate to Server" and use the Wizard.

From the CLI, you can use "xe vm-migrate" command.

If you really want to share local storages, the answer depends on how your other hosts look like.

If you want their local storage to participate in this shared storage configuration, you can try something unsupported (these will likely require that you recompile your XenServer's dom0 kernel):

DRBD
Some clustered filesystem (e.g. OCFS2, GlusterFS)

The other option is to export each host's local storage back to the pool using NFS or iSCSI. In this way, you will end with multiple Pool-wide Storage Repositories (one corresponding to each host that is sharing their local disks).

Some shared storage as DRBD or GlusterFS would be nice. But it is dificult configure on XenServer6.2. — Lukáš Viktora, Oct 31 '13 at 11:33

XenServer Shared Local Stage

2 Answers2