[OOTB-infra] Virtualisation platforms - IRC discussion

Mon Nov 3 22:13:31 GMT 2014

Hi guys.

Sorry for the absence/silence but moving has been a beach so to speak.
I should be more present online as the week rolls on now as I gradually settle down here.
Regarding the infrastructure, we should keep in mind that we as an organisation do not provide 
services to any customers beyond show casing the platform that we’re supporting so therefore I do not think there’s a need for redundancy in the infrastructure, at least not yet at this stage as there is nothing in our operational envelope requires that we have 100% uptime of our infrastructure. I do agree however that, as Heiko
has kindly volunteered ;) his expertise to set up the infrastructure, yes he should ultimately have a say in setup, 
however, I am not so sure that we proceed with an infrastructure setup that can only be managed by one person. In case of absence or Heiko decides to withdraw in the (near or far) future someone else must be able to take over.
We ought to be considering ease-of-use/easy-to-maintain solutions for the infrastructure.
(Apologies for the incomplete first mail. I was tired at tired of writing)
___________________________________________________________________________
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you've done anything at all.

On 03 Nov 2014, at 12:10, Martin Cosgrave <martin at ocretail.com> wrote:

> 
> Nov 3rd, 11:39 - 12:05 CET
> 
> <marsbard> hi-ko: I'd just like to be very sure, before we commit to a proprietary product, that we can't get along with a FOSS product, I think it would be better if the bee stuff was FOSS if possible. ohej, bmejias, do you guys have an opinion on this?
> <marsbard> hi-ko: presumably we could still transfer vms but it would need an extra step of converting them to ovf I suppose
> <marsbard> I mean to take them to vmware if we had to
> --> twen (~twen at unaffiliated/twen) has joined #orderofthebee
> <hi-ko> the vm will not contain any closed license stuff at all just open-vm-tools - but will us make sure it runs in the customer environment wich is in most cases not kvm. So it's just a question of the runtime and how to avoid/solve problems as efficient as possible
> <bmejias> marsbard, I haven't follow the discussion, but in terms of "principles", I agree that I'd prefer to have as much as possible with FOSS software
> <marsbard> who are the customers? from ootb PoV?
> <bmejias> marsbard, but I'm not religious in that sense. If something is correctly justified, AND there is no FOSS alternative...
> <marsbard> bmejias: I'm totally in agreement there, but the kvm solutions look really good, judging from my short time looking at them over the weekend
> <marsbard> of course if hi-ko is going to do the infrastructure install then it will of course be fastest to build on what he knows
> <hi-ko> marsbard, bmejias: I don't agree with runtime. We did the error in the past to choose for a FOSS virt platform and nobody cares about that huge amount of extra work you have to to if you don't run on best practice platforms
> <hi-ko> marsbard: OOTB end customers? --> has to be discussed ;-)
> <marsbard> hi-ko: indeed, to be discussed, so we can hardly make judgements about what they need, can we? ;-)
> <marsbard> or can I presume you have some ideas you are thinking about? ;-)
> <bmejias> in any case, we use VMWare over here hosting plenty of RHEL's, and I don't have any say on that.
> <bmejias> on my previous job we were using KVM for the local instances...
> <bmejias> so, I don't have a strong opinion....
> <bmejias> marsbard's argument regarding "who is doing the job" and that "it is better that is done in something he knows about" is a good one
> <marsbard> I think it is easiest to go with vmware now if hi-ko is going to do the install for us (I hope I'm not being presumptuous about that hi-ko!)
> <marsbard> personally I am going to try to get some hardware with working virtualisation capabilities and play with some of the other options
> <marsbard> actually my buddy who has a server at the same place has a kvm setup I believe so maybe I can try out the tools on his server
> <hi-ko> marsbard: I don't have the time this moment to discuss in detail but we have ~8 years histroy in set up and maintain alfresco systems in end customer environments. I haven't seen KVM once. We supported Xen somewhen in the past but it was too much work for 2-3 customers in allover europe
> <hi-ko> I'm not docmatic - just pragmatic
> <bmejias> marsbard, yeah, until we haven't someone grokking the FOSS alternative, we better go for the "know-how" choice
> <marsbard> ok, thanks hi-ko and bmejias
> <hi-ko> marsbard: May the force bee with you
> <marsbard> then again... there is enough budget to cover two servers? could it be worth getting a second and using it to prove the case for alfresco vms on KVM? So we can get moving quickly on our core servers via ESXi and then also use the FOSS tools for other things
> -*- marsbard looks over the conversation to see if anything needs to be summarised in the mailing list
> <hi-ko> two platforms for which added value?
> <hi-ko> no fail over - no interchange ...
> <hi-ko> marsbard: idea is the backup one server from the other which only makes sense if they run the same virtualisation
> <marsbard> I didn't know we were planning on failover
> <hi-ko> kvm is the best choise if the knowledge and support is available on maintainers side
> <hi-ko> not real failover, but hardware will fail some day and it's just vm start on the other side to be online again
> <marsbard> I'm not sure that we are such a wealthy organisation that we want to have a server just sitting there waiting for the other one to fail. I would rather have another working server and if the hardware fails we take the downtime and restore from backups
> <hi-ko> marsbard: no the server just saves the backup from the other in case something fails one can host both
> --> douglascrp (~douglascr at pluto.konsultex.com.br) has joined #orderofthebee
> <marsbard> I see what you're saying hi-ko, e.g. 3 VMs on each, and if one host goes down the other hosts 6 VMs temporarily
> <hi-ko> marsbard: exactly - or you decide to temporarily stop vm 4 or what ever
> <marsbard> ok
> <hi-ko> server 1 runs all systems which are visible from outside and should perform well, server 2 runs all test systems and may slow down if a build process or a benchmark is running
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