Couple Questions

[TOoSmOotH]

I have been reading the documentation but I had a few quick questions that I can't seem to find the answers to.

What is the host OS?

Do I have to use local storage? I have a large enterprise environment where I rely heavily on NAS. Can I have all of my appliances running off of NAS storage? (Do this with VMWare today).

Am I limited to the amount of cores in a single machine as to the amount of CPUs I can assign an appliance?

Thanks!

[JAnttila]

I have been reading the documentation but I had a few quick questions that I can't seem to find the answers to.

What is the host OS?

Not quite sure what you are asking here but to start a node off to be Applogic ready you would install CentOS 5.x 32 bit linux and then run the 'ald-reimage' command to install Applogic. As for guest OS's we support a full range of Linux, Windows and Solaris OS images.


Do I have to use local storage? I have a large enterprise environment where I rely heavily on NAS. Can I have all of my appliances running off of NAS storage? (Do this with VMWare today).

Yes you have to use DSA storage. The default method of storing data volumes in Applogic is to take the DSA and build a IP SAN with it. From this IP SAN we replicate your data volumes across the network to a second node on your backbone and mirror the data to it. Essentially RAID1 across the network. With the IP SAN you can also do other tasks like modify the replication levels, create, destroy, repair, resize, export, import, migrate existing volumes and more much like you would on a large commercial SAN. We use this method to keep the operating costs of Applogic down by allowing you to build all of the infrastructure for your grid from commodity based hardware. The beauty of this model is that if you need more storage you just add more grid nodes and you are able to spread the load of the VM's across all of the server chassis disk IO vs sending it all back to the SAN device over expensive FC or iSCSI networks.

You can also access and store data to a SAN/NAS device if that device will allow you to export volumes with CIFS, NFS, SMBFS or any other networked file system that can be mounted in Windows or Linux but you will not be able to boot your VM's from it.[/quote]


Am I limited to the amount of cores in a single machine as to the amount of CPUs I can assign an appliance?

Thanks!

Yes currently you can have upto 32 cores in a single VM if the underlying hardware will support it. The largest VM's I have built to date where 16 ( 4 socket quad core) cores with 62GB of RAM. Keeping in mind also that you can have many VM's all under one application.

Hope this answers all your questions.

Jeremy

[TOoSmOotH]

Not quite sure what you are asking here but to start a node off to be Applogic ready you would install CentOS 5.x 32 bit linux and then run the 'ald-reimage' command to install Applogic. As for guest OS's we support a full range of Linux, Windows and Solaris OS images.

I am looking for the OS I lay down on my systems I am planning on making my host grid with. I have a bunch of coolthread sun servers that would like to use. Not sure if CentOS supports those yet. I know these are pretty beefy machines but its all we support at the moment.




Yes currently you can have upto 32 cores in a single VM if the underlying hardware will support it. The largest VM's I have built to date where 16 ( 4 socket quad core) cores with 62GB of RAM. Keeping in mind also that you can have many VM's all under one application.

Hope this answers all your questions.

Jeremy

I would need at least 2 in this config though correct? So I have somewhere for a large VM to fail over to? I was thinking more on the database side if I needed a beefy database server how big I could go. Thanks for the information this helps.