Virtualization and HA, Scalability
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Technically scalability and HA are completely different concepts. But in modern system design, they come and go together, making the answer often pretty easy. Old style scalability was at odds with HA (the inverted pyramid of doom model) so finding a way to do both was challenging (read: expensive.) But with hyperconvergence, the two are essentially merged and it isn't hard to find them almost always together today. So products that solve one, almost always solve the other.
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@scottalanmiller thanks for helping
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@kelsey said in Virtualization and HA, Scalability:
@scottalanmiller thanks for helping
Any time. We are always here and try very hard to be supportive and welcoming. We have mostly all been through the IT university process and we know how tough it is.
Glad to have you here joining us. -
Some vendors in hyperconvergence to keep an eye on would include @StarWind_Software / @KOOLER and @scale Computing, as well as HPE's Simplivity ( poking @HPEStorageGuy ) as they are leading products and companies and are all active here should you want to talk to any directly. There are lots of players getting into this market, like VMware, Dell, Nutanix, etc. and loads of confusing products. But those three are early leaders with a lot of knowledge and support.
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Highly Available systems that are hyperconverged systems typically make the most sense... as Scott said, they also have the benefit of being very scalable. You can easily add more compute, storage, or other resources as needed, by adding more nodes or components to existing nodes.
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@tim_g thanks
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@scottalanmiller thanks for the mention. As was mentioned, Scale Computing makes scalable, highly available hyperconverged virtualization platform solutions. If there are any questions that we can answer about our products or HC concepts, we're here to assist. Sounds like a good class project and a chance to provide a lot of material for your class.
Is this written work or do you get to give a presentation?
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@scale this is written work but we have done a presentation to
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@kelsey said in Virtualization and HA, Scalability:
@scale this is written work but we have done a presentation to
If you needed presentation materials, I'm sure that we could find some for you.
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@scale we have done the presentation that was about proxmox , VSphere and things like that, that was group work but the written work is on my own
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@kelsey said in Virtualization and HA, Scalability:
@scale we have done the presentation that was about proxmox , VSphere and things like that, that was group work but the written work is on my own
Those are all interesting projects (we could have a long discussion about how Proxmox is a scam company, but we can save that for another time, but they get no love in technical communities as they run big scam review games to try to convince people that someone uses them), but they are just pieces of a puzzle when used on their own. None of them do the things that you need, but can be part of what you are looking at.
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@scottalanmiller we had to use them for the presentation but that done i think anyway
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@kelsey said in Virtualization and HA, Scalability:
@scottalanmiller we had to use them for the presentation but that done i think anyway
Was the presentation how they failed to fit the need? LOL
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@scottalanmiller this was for the presentation -Each group will be required to deliver a presentation of about 30 minutes to the whole class, showing what they have installed including the major system components and salient features. The presentation should also include a critical evaluation of the applicability of the solution to the problems faced by the computing industry.
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@kelsey said in Virtualization and HA, Scalability:
@dustinb3403 thats the question problems faced by organisations implementing highly available and scalable computing resources, evaluation of potential solutions, selection of a solution for the organisation chosen and discussion and critical evaluation of implementations with particular reference to the lab systems installed.
One of the best ways to tackle this is to present unique scenarios and argue for implementations.
This isn't the kind of thing that can be chosen generically. The workloads, budget, value, performance, scale - all matter, a lot. Some workloads, like Active Directory or databases, would require that the features than most would promote be disabled.
Hopefully the class is tackling the idea of high availability in layers - HA at this layer would ignore application failure, for example.
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@kelsey our latest blog post might be useful for your class as well:
https://mangolassi.it/topic/16198/4-it-pitfalls-to-avoid-in-2018
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@scale thanks
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@kelsey said in Virtualization and HA, Scalability:
@scottalanmiller this was for the presentation -Each group will be required to deliver a presentation of about 30 minutes to the whole class, showing what they have installed including the major system components and salient features. The presentation should also include a critical evaluation of the applicability of the solution to the problems faced by the computing industry.
Yeah, there's no general HA concept. It all depends on what needs to be HA.
What typically needs to be HA is a service being provided, whether it's a website or web application, database, cloud computing infrastructure, storage, etc... you can have hardware HA, but not application HA, vice versa, or both. There are a lot of factors.
Are you supposed to pick out a specific application or platform that needs HA, and present a solution?
For example, MS SQL server can be HA simply (from a high level) by using two different servers and the the built-in software HA features. And that's if you are even using MS SQL.
If you need a single HA hypervisor, depending on your hypervisor, your solution will be different... though you'll still need more than one physical server. If you use internal storage vs external storage, multiple redundant SANs... the rabbit hole is so deep and HA depends on so many factors.
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@tim_g
thats what we have to do but the part i am on is the report which is this - In addition to the practical task, an individual report is to be produced on the application of virtualisation technologies to an organisation of your choice. The report should contain an introduction to the problems faced by organisations implementing highly available and scalable computing resources, evaluation of potential solutions, selection of a solution for the organisation chosen and discussion and critical evaluation of implementations with particular reference to the lab systems installed. -
@kelsey said in Virtualization and HA, Scalability:
This is a picture of an IPOD. . .
AKA Inverted Pyramid of Doom.
If you lose your storage server for any reason, both physical host 1 and 2 are useless.
