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Is this provider running OpenVZ under Xen?
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Is this provider running OpenVZ under Xen?

ZeroZero Member
edited February 2012 in General

Hello all,

so, today I was configuring a VPS and I've seen a pretty worrying thing:

uname -r
2.6.18-274.18.1.el5.028stab098.1xen

This shows the host machine kernel right?
It's a Xen VM?

«1

Comments

  • Or probably is a machine with a kernel capable of both virtualization techs?

  • What host is this, @Zero?

  • @Aldryic TechieVPS

  • They might be running OpenVZ on one of their Xen nodes

  • Tokyo VPS with 600Mb/1.2GB Burst, 10GB HDD with 1TB of transfer for $5.95/mo ($60/Y) ?

  • @LES Yes, but in The Netherlands.
    @dmmcintyre3 OpenVZ does not need it's own kernel to work?

  • Just do a "ps aux", if a bunch of strange processes in square brackets show up its probably xen, otherwise OpenVZ.

  • ZeroZero Member
    edited February 2012

    @dmmcintyre3 Ouch, I didn't know that.
    @gsrdgrdghd Nothing strange there.

    Ok, seems that they are running OpenVZ & Xen on the same machine and since the I/O is 19.1 MB/s I think is being oversold.

  • That's one way to oversell Xen ...

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    check if /proc/xen exists :)

    Francisco

  • Yes, there is a directory called xen that contains these files:

    balloon capabilities privcmd xenbus

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    paste balloon please

    Francisco

  • cat /proc/xen/balloon
    Current allocation: 10829824 kB
    Requested target:   10829824 kB
    Low-mem balloon:    162455552 kB
    High-mem balloon:          0 kB
    Driver pages:              0 kB
    Xen hard limit:          ??? kB
  • Yes, that's OpenVZ running under Xen. I do this all the time on development containers so I don't have to buy a dedicated server.

  • @Francisco

    Current allocation:  6930432 kB
    Requested target:    6930432 kB
    Low-mem balloon:    103964672 kB
    High-mem balloon:          0 kB
    Driver pages:              0 kB
    Xen hard limit:          ??? kB
  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    Looks like it most likely is.

    The whole node only has 6.7G RAM.

    It's possible they're using XEN to give them a ghetto style remote KVM?

    Francisco

  • It's not likely, it is. That's the OpenVZ kernel for Xen...

  • What you have here is OpenVZ in the cloud. You have a truly dynamically, scalable solution where node memory and disk space can be added ad-hoc (without downtime) across 5 locations, (8 more coming in the next few weeks). Server backups,security and redundancy are all abstracted. All storage is backed onto enterprise class SANS with significantly more redundancy than using only local storage solutions

  • If the hardware you VM is running on fails then it auto-migrates to another machine and restarts

  • @liam said: my vps would never experience any downtime

    i lol'd

  • @liam no, but you can still admire the water vapour that is left :)

    Thanked by 1Liam
  • @liam but that's exactly what 'cloud' is ;-)

    Thanked by 1Liam
  • gsrdgrdghdgsrdgrdghd Member
    edited February 2012

    @liam said: Why did you lol? We're talking about cloud computering which, by defination, means your data is in more than one place to ensure it's constantly up.

    -

    Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet) Source

    Only an idiot would ever promise "100% uptime"

    Thanked by 1Liam
  • image

    1. vps.net is not a valid source for definitions
    2. The ressources provided by vps.net are provided over the Internet
    3. You said that cloud computing "means 100% uptime". You still have to verify this claim.
  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    Cloud doesn't have a definition. The ones people accept are normally related to billing, in that people can up/down grade 'on the fly', normally just requiring a quick reboot and a partition resizing if it's storage.

    My #1 concern with such a setup is always SAN performance and SAN's going R/O when they fail over. I can't imagine endangering customers data to such harsh rebuilds. I'm sure you guys/gals have been trying to improve that, but that's just how DRBD/etc handles rebuilds I guess.

    Lordy, if VPS.net is claiming that's the meaning of cloud.... I can't finish this since there's no way to not sound like a complete arsehole.

    Francisco

    Thanked by 1Liam
  • To me, cloud... is the fluffy thing that floats in the sky. It's not always up though, sometimes you get a blue sky with no clouds.

  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    @liam said: Companies such as vps.net have a normal vps node (Xen) but with SAN drives and claim it's a 'coud'. As @francisco says SANS have a lot of issues. They seem to fail regularily for vps.net according to WHT. SAN drives also normally have pretty horid i/o speeds and as @francisco mentioned, it can take vps.net several weeks to restore a VM after a failure.

    Understand i'm not taking a shot at their staff, skill or anything like that. What I'm taking a pot shot at is just SAN's in general. VPS.NET has staff/developers that will put together a system in an afternoon that'd take me days/weeks to come up with - If I even could.

    Anyone that follows cloudfail, though, would see that the majority of the 'cloud' providers out there, especially VPS.NET have serious SAN issues. Yes, they're working to fix it but that was the same story last year and the time before that when they were trying to use ZFS I think.

    SAN's are just trouble starters and a risky thing to get into. Gigecloud has had issues with their SAN's. Amazon has melted down for multiple days because of their centralized SAN (local storage was fine, of course).

    Rackspace was smart in this all, they are like linode with a 'cloud like' environment, where it's just local storage with cloud provisioning ontop + tons of head room on each node.

    Unless you have extremely deep pockets to get an enterprise SAN like steadfast I guess, you're going to have one hell of a time competing with your linux NFS/iSCSI setup. Sure, it might bench well when it works....when it works.

    Francisco

  • I love the way rus foster always finds new ways to oversell like fk. Its truly amazing Credit to you Rus!

  • prometeusprometeus Member, Host Rep

    @Francisco said: SAN's are just trouble starters and a risky thing to get into

    SAN aren't easy. SAN can be a nightmare :-)
    But they are dependable, handle very high loads and you can clusterize HA services.

    We have 2 kind of SAN which sometime got us some headache, but at the same time allow us to have record uptime for most of our services:

    • 2 x Coraid SRX 3200 that use the AOE protocol. (we use Coraid products since 2005 I think), cheapest than FC and easy to use with linux. We use these with our RHEV KVM cluster, vmware cluster, CDP backups and other storage services
    • 2 x StorageTek 6130 Fiber Channel, a bit old and slow now. We use them with the old XenServer Cluster and for the new OpenVZ servers now (a new life for them!).

    I must admit that the target of our services wasn't the low end market, else I hardly think we should have bought the fiber channel gears for cheap services ;)

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