180 VPS history

For the past 6 years, our company has been providing people with dedicated server capacity. From them every day we receive a large number of requests of rather unusual content, stories about which I have long wanted to start sharing with you.



Recently, we were approached by a new client who needed to raise 180 Linux virtual machines as soon as possible according to the pattern he had prepared. The customer needed a complete management system with a console and control over these UPUs.



Despite the extensive experience in implementing virtualization solutions, it became clear that this task would require a non-standard approach, because:

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1) Hyper-V 2008, which we usually used, traditionally unpredictably coped with Linux, such as - for example, there were problems with the file system, the machines could not return from the reboot, after installing the integration services it became impossible to update the system kernel.



2) The limit of virtual machines on the same Hyper-V 2008 cluster by that time was almost exhausted:







As a result, despite the fact that the new cluster based on Hyper-V 2012, in which Microsoft marketers promised to expand the horizons of virtualization far beyond the limits of the possible and the impossible, was already on the way, it was decided not to wait for this reverent moment for all, but to make what many colleagues in the workshop have advised us for a long time is to raise the KVM hypervisor in order to protect itself as much as possible against most problems with * nix.



We chose SolusVM as a control panel as an inexpensive, tested and easy-to-use tool with full support.



As a hardware, a dual-processor Xeon E5630 based on the Supermicro platform was used, with 96GB of memory and 12 SAS 15K disks up to 300GB.



KVM and SolusVM allowed us to create an empty virtual machine to the client as a template, over which we transferred control to the client for configuration without any problems. He spent about a few hours with her and returned to us, adding to her weight about 10 gigabytes of installed software. After that, the migration began.



At this point, it is worth praising KVM for its unusually high (after the experience with Hyper-V 2008), the speed of virtualon cloning from templates. Relying on 8 server cores - creating and initializing 4 virtual machines at a time, he spent on creating each batch of less than 10 minutes, thus creating 24 machines per hour with which we successfully congratulated him, having gone off to rest home, because it was already night outside.



In the morning everything was ready - 180 installed by the UPU, requiring reverent attention and further work:







There were some minor difficulties. It was necessary to establish a static IP on each of the prepared machines, for which, on the basis of guestfish, was createdclinging to the hard disk of each of them to offline to correct the necessary parameters, which coped with its task in just a minute.



Finally, when it seemed that happiness was just around the corner, new problems with the network arose - no problem, 180 machines interacting within their network were not accessible from the outside - even ping did not pass. As a result of long dances with tambourines and firewalls, old-timers managed to recall that the switch used for the task a long time ago to protect against spoofing was set a limit on issuing MAC addresses of up to 20 pieces, disabling which we managed to get rid of the last headache and make the client happy during.



As a result, in just a few hours, 180 virtual machines were safely deployed. The client himself was satisfied and uses the machine for a second month. We were satisfied and we highly appreciated the possibilities of the KVM and SolusVM bundles for the Linux platform. The only drawback was the lack of a thin allocation of resources that we are going to fix with the help of Nexenta , the implementation of which is now in full swing. I will tell about this next week.



The moral is: SolusVM licenses cost about $ 100, and a convenient and simple orchestrator is obtained. You can assemble and connect the master and the slave machine quickly and according to the instructions. Operation and backup is easy. At the time of writing this article, we already have 3 such nodes, 2 in Moscow and one in the Netherlands with full billing automation and automatic deployment of virtual machines from SolusVM with a simple SOAP API. Over the week, we have completely screwed everything into billing and our resource management system.



Happiness and success to all server rear workers on the eve of the long-awaited holiday,

Hostkey company.