Virtualization

Virtualization is a key component of any contemporary infrastructure. And unfortunately, it multiplies the effects of hardware outages: if a physical server fails, then this affects multiple virtual machines and service. When talking about virtualization, it's thus crucial to also talk about High Availability.

We have a long history of developing and implementing virtualization with DRBD and Pacemaker. Florian published the first resource agent that could control the libvirt virtualization framework from of Pacemaker. Thousands of people have heard our presentations on virtualization with DRBD and iSCSI. If you want highly-available virtualization, we will be happy to assist.

How do I get started?

Numerous virtualization solutions and frameworks for Linux exist. If you like to get started quickly, installing a standard Linux distribution on two servers and running KVM or XEN on top if this will be sufficient. In such setups, DRBD allows you to replicate the VMs' data between your servers and Pacemaker will make sure that all needed VMs are running.

We'd be happy to assist you in setting up shop. Based on our multi-year experience, we can get you going in a day or less.

What if I need something more scalable?

This is where enterprise cloud configurations come in. In typical setups, we'll set up two standard servers with loads of diskspace. We'll configure DRBD and Pacemaker, and set up iSCSI to export the server's data to your hypervisor hosts. These run your virtual machines, and are standard, off-the-shelf servers, too. A future-proof investment with practically unlimited scalability.

We can assist you in planning and deploying enterprise clouds, from initial concept to installation, testing and acceptance.

I want something ultra light weight. What do I do?

We build our virtualization solutions on pluggable free and open source software (F/OSS) components. If you prefer container-based virtual environments like OpenVZ, Linux Containers or Linux-VServer, all we do is swap out one component for another.

Give us a call, we can help!

What if I prefer VMware or XenServer?

Prepackaged systems like VMWare ESX or Citrix XenServer are options, too. Just contact us to see how we can bring our expertise to bear!

Do you plan to go virtual but don't know how? Or is your existing virtualization setup causing you headache? We can provide expert consulting services around virtualization. Ask The Expert Now!