I own an ISP and I'm also friends with another local ISP. We both want to setup cloud storage, a streaming media server, and eventually hosting services for our customers, so we're wanting an easily scalable storage system and a clustered VM environment. Basically we're starting a small data center. I want a system where we can easily scale out either storage or horsepower or both. My current idea is as follows:
We want to initially start with 6 servers.3 of them will be Freenas systems with a 20TB pool each using RaidZ2 on 6 hard drives.These Freenas systems will also host an Ubuntu server running glusterfs for a total of 3 nodes, to begin with.The other 3 (physical) servers will provide VM horsepower via oVirt in a clustered environment with the Ubuntu/gluster nodes providing the storage backend.The reason I want to do it this way is so that we can lose 2 hard drives per server or an entire Freenas/Ubuntu server and still be ok and running. oVirt allows you to easily connect to a glusterfs backend for storage and easily sets up a VM cluster environment, which is the reason I chose that over other offerings like Proxmox, Xen, ect. According to oVirt if we were to lose one of the 3 servers, the VMs on that server would failover to the other 2. I like that idea.All 6 servers will be connected to a dedicated 10Gb aggregate switch.
This is my rough draft. I'm pretty new to clustered environments. I've looked into maas, openstack, and ceph but I could never get all that working in order to create a proof of concept or determine whether or not maas/openstack or ceph was what I needed. If someone were to nudge me in any of those directions, I would take the time to learn, make them work and test them out. I was kinda hoping someone would chime in and either stop me from making a terrible decision and steer me in the right direction or tell me I'm on the right track. I don't want to set all of this up, only to realize there is some critical limit in the future when we go to add more Freenas/Ubuntu servers for more storage or that this system will be horribly slow when we add more storage. I'm open to any and all possibilities...open source of course.
I've included a chart that might help show what I'm wanting to do.
Bookmarks