KVM/Qemu hot failover on separate machine?

[1clue]

Hi,

I'm trying to set up a multi-subnet network which will be largely on VMs, including the networking appliances but which will also have physical machines on it.

What I want to do is have two or more KVM/Qemu hosts with multiple NICs in them. The NICs will be donated to router/firewall VMs. For safety, I want to duplicate the critical VMs (both networking-related and other) across the wire to the other host, so I have failover of the entire VM. I would configure critical networking components such that the entire system is contained in each VM, so if one host goes down I'm still up.

I've never tried this on Linux-KVM. Is there somebody here who can make recommendations on how to proceed?

Thanks.

[CharlesA]

I don't know if this will do what you want, but it sounds like it will:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/High_Availability_Cluster

Also here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1952485

[1clue]

Wow.

I guess I made an assumption that Proxmox was commercial software. My bad.

Without having read the entire page, it appears that Proxmox is a contender. That second link takes it a bit further, and it's my scenario too.

Thanks.

[CharlesA]

I guess I made an assumption that Proxmox was commercial software. My bad.

It kinda is. You can use the free version, which is what I use at home, or you could get a subscription that has some benefits over the free version.

[1clue]

Once you pointed it out, I paid more attention to the website than I had the first time through on my own. I had originally dismissed it as payware, and since this is a SOHO project I wasn't all that interested.

Now I see it's sort of the Crossover/Wine type arrangement. Which is fine IMO.