[Lustre-discuss] Migrating virtual machines over Lustre using Proxmox

[Paul Gray]

Like most of the readers on the list, my background with Lustre 
originates from cluster environments.  But as virtualization trends seem 
to be here to stay, the question of using Lustre to support large-scale 
distributed virtualization naturally arises.  Being able to leverage 
Lustre benefits in a VM cloud would seem to have quite a few advantages.

As a test case, at UNI we extended the Proxmox Virtualization 
Environment to support *live* Virtual Machine migration across separate 
physical (bare-metal) hosts of the Proxmox virtualization cluster, 
supported by a distributed Lustre filesystem.

If you aren't familiar with Proxmox and live migration support over 
Lustre, what we deployed at UNI is akin to being able to do VMWare's 
VMotion over Lustre (without the associated license costs).

We put together two screencasts showing the prototype deployment and 
wanted to share the proof-of-concept results with the community:

*)  A small demonstration of live migration with a small Debian VM whose 
root filesystem is supported over a distributed lustre implementation 
can be found here:
   http://dragon.cs.uni.edu/flash/proxmoxlustre.html

*)  A short screencast showing live migration over Lustre using the 
Proxmox GUI can be viewed here:
    http://dragon.cs.uni.edu/flash/gui-migration.html

Our immediate interests are in the performance of large (in terms of 
quantity), dynamic, live migrations that would leverage our 
high-throughput IB-based Lustre subsystem from our clusters.  We'd 
welcome your comments, feedback, questions or requests for specific 
benchmarks to explore.

ADVthanksANCE
-- 
Paul Gray                                         -o)
314 East Gym, Dept. of Computer Science           /\\
University of Northern Iowa                      _\_V
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