Categories
General NSP Xen

Xenserver Enterprise + Fibrechannel storage = live migration

I finally got round to booking time at the IBM demo center to have a fiddle with Xen Enterprise on shared storage. They’ve got a good range of entry-level kit at the demo center, but the important bits (for me anyway) were a Bladecenter H chassis with some HS21 blades fitted with Fibrechannel HBAs, and a DS3400 Fibrechannel storage array.

The IBM DS3000 series of arrays looks really promising. There’s three current variants – SAS, iSCSI and Fibrechannel attached, along with an EXP3000 expansion shelf. All four systems will scale to 48 SAS (14.4 TB) drives over 4 shelves, and an IBM firmware announcement I read online the other day strongly suggests they will support SATA drives in the very near future (36 TB using 750 GB disks). And the DS3000 series are cheap. Performance is pretty good, but you can only stack the controller with 1GB of cache – which really highlights the “entry level” bit of these SANs. The SAS attached option is compelling as well – you get SAN functionality, very close to FC levels of performance (3 Gbps peak HBA throughput for SAS compared to 4Gbps for FC), at a fraction of the cost. The DS3200 allows 6 single-connect or 3 dual-connect hosts, and as soon as IBM get round to releasing a SAS switch, that limit will disappear.

I’d used the DS3400 management software in the past, so setting up a LUN within the existing array took about 5 minutes, including creating the host to WWN mappings; and I had two Xenserver Enterprise installs already set up on a matched pair of blades from a previous attempt at this with the DS3300.

Xenserver Enterprise supports shared storage, but as of version 4.0.1, it only supports NFS or iSCSI shared storage officially. I’d had problems getting the openiscsi software iSCSI stack that Xenserver ships with to communicate successfully with the DS3300 however, and ran out of time. On the other hand, FC shared storage is just not supported at all yet. There’s a forum article explaining Xensource’s position on the support, which also links to a knowledge base article describing how shared storage works in Xenserver. The article was pulled with the release of 4.0.1:

“We took it down because, with the level of testing and integration we could do by initial release of 4.0, we couldn’t be any further along than a partial beta. There are business reasons we couldn’t ship a product as released while describing some of the features as “beta”, and it is hypocritical for us to officially describe a way of using the product yet describe that as “unsupported.” For that reason, until we are ready to release supported shared Fibre Channel SRs, we’re not going to put the KB article back up.”

The article describes the overall setup you have to have in place to have FC shared storage working – namely array, LUN and zoning management on the SAN and HBA, and locating the device node that maps to the corresponding LUN. And then there are two commands to run, on one node of your Xenserver pool, and your shared storage system is up and running.

At this point it took about another 5 minutes to create a Debian Etch domU, and verify that live migration between physical hosts was indeed working.

I set up a slightly more complicated scenario, which I’m planning on using with some other software to demonstrate a HA / DR environment, but which also enabled me to do one of those classic cheesy live migration “but it still works” tests – I connected a Wyse thinclient through to a terminal server domU, migrated the TS between physical hosts, and demonstrated that the terminal session stayed up. A ping left running during this time experienced a brief bump of about 100 ms during the final cutover, but that’s possible attributable forwarding-path updates in the bridge devices on the Xenserver hosts. Either way it works well. Moving a win2k3 terminal server took about 15 seconds on the hardware I was working with.
Overall, I’m quietly encouraged by this functionality and it’s ease of set up. I’m perhaps a bit underwhelmed by it too – it ended up being such a nonevent to get it working, that I’m annoyed I didn’t get round to setting up the demonstration months ago.

3 replies on “Xenserver Enterprise + Fibrechannel storage = live migration”

Hi Daniel
Just to confirm that you got the Xen Motion running on IBM BladeCenter HS21 Blades, with a DS3400? i ask as i am looking at that solution and using a blade to do NFS sharing, which is something i would happily do away with.
Denver

Denver,

Yes, it’s definitely working. I was using qlogic HBAs, but emulex ones are listed as supported as well. The KB article linked from the forum post mentioned earlier has everything you need.

Other, perhaps relevant points:

* I was booting from local storage, but there’s no real need to – boot from SAN would be fine too.
* You need at least 16 GB of space for each Xenserver install (sadly, this means IBM’s solid state drives at 15.8 GB aren’t *quite* big enough)
* I set my hosts up before attaching the storage LUN. If you do it the other way round, it probably pays to not use the storage LUN as “storage” during the Xenserver install, as you have to manually create the SR later on, and specify that it’s shared.

DanielI am new to the whole world of bladeCenters and such and we are trying to setup a DS3300 basically I’m trying ot get it mounted as another file system to point to to pull the data from. I have it setup with GFS but RHEL 5 doesn’t seem to want to play nicely with it. any ideas?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.