Any Xen/Failover-Cloud style VM hosting "offshore" areas?

Portal Home > Knowledgebase > Articles Database > Any Xen/Failover-Cloud style VM hosting "offshore" areas?

Posted by cmanns, 01-24-2011, 04:21 AM
I have a VM not much clients on it, but the IO wait there is getting bad. Got a nice deal in USA after issues there we switched but I can't decide on a host. We like the ability to burst, etc. I don't see any good solutions only OpenVZ and such, I want xen/xcp with fast/reliable disk storage, one guy had raid0 lol.... fail over to another xen node is key in our goal to find.
Posted by Rens, 01-24-2011, 04:33 AM
What do you call offshore? Europe? Asia? There are plenty of options all over the world.
Posted by cmanns, 01-24-2011, 04:38 AM
We currently are in estonia, great ping UK/USA (east/west coast) I can't find any solutions there, not in asia. Legal porn, not much downloads.We're more of a performance/high reliability solution in mind, though we have 100TB~ bandwidth in US on GiGE, we'd like to match that in europe areas for backup, etc. Basically 4~ Core or more avail 3-4GB ram at start Disks must be quick, I have had xen hosts which multiple vm's on same area go down with mysql optimize, current new solution doesn't go down during tar/untar/mysql/etc. We don't use much currently but we'd like a clean path of newer systems planned with host, most xen hosts should be on dual quad xeons and what not. Whatever works initially as long as we have RAM/Disk/Failover, we don't use much cpu (Currently have 8 xeon cores assigned to vm for about 50~) we expect to up the price more, esp as we load more we'll plan for 8 core/10~ GB ram in a few months time for upwards of 150~ near a dedi price. Hope that helps
Posted by Rens, 01-24-2011, 05:59 AM
If you are located in Europe i would look for a cloud provider in UK/NL/DE. If it is all legal, you should be able to find this easily. Take a look in the offers section
Posted by boskone, 01-25-2011, 10:18 AM
A good Xen based cloud provider will be using high performance SAN for primary disk, meaning very low IO and great performance. Don't confuse basic VPS offerings with local disks in the servers - this is not a cloud at all really.
Posted by iTom, 01-25-2011, 01:21 PM
There are a few "off shore" VPS providers. However what is it you actually wanting to do, as off shore around here can mean a few different things...
Posted by JasonD10, 01-25-2011, 02:07 PM
Boskone, Utilizing local storage is fine, as long as the local storage is pooled into a virtual IP SAN. In fact, utilizing local storage is more cost effective and can be simpler than using central SAN's depending on the specs of the Cloud. What you have to watch out for is people using JUST local storage calling it a Cloud when in fact they are not redundant. Ask the host if the Cloud Server/Cloud VPS is on a server that crashes, will it automatically and instantly be restarted on another available server? Is the data mirrored on at least two physical servers? 3Tera's AppLogic platform is built this way, and there are also other technologies out there such as Datacore's SANMelody that perform in this function. Data can be pooled to create a redundant and high available environment in many fashions and does not need just one (or two) redundant SAN's. Each server in fact can be a SAN in a cloud when done this way.
Posted by boskone, 01-27-2011, 05:15 PM
That's certainly one kind of cloud solution, although I prefer a centralised SAN where bursty IO requirements, or big IO peaks or surges wont impact anyone else on a server. Does applogic spread load like that?
Posted by JasonD10, 01-27-2011, 05:33 PM
It can, and you can hybrid a Cloud using an external SAN as well if you like. However, we have some very high IO clouds built using Enterprise SSD drives. The cost/performance is just flat out ridiculous
Posted by gocloud, 03-06-2011, 09:32 AM
CloudWeb, Would you mind sharing the info about node specification of that very high IO cloud that you have built using Enterprise SSDs (probably Intel SLCs?) Have you seen performance increase in applogic volume migration processes (if you ever tried them given that you use SLC SSDs) ((and who maybe behind the hardware RAID?)) Can you share a bit of information as I'm now in the process of investigating replacing my 1TB WD in nodes for something else which is more reliable and quicker? Have been toying around switching to internal HBA (LSI1064E RAID10) just to avoid degraded nodes with failed single sata drives but not sure if I will be paying penalty somewhere else down the line. P.S. I do not need a lot of storage in the grid, 200GB at most on 4 nodes. But I need it to be as quick as possible and to be more reliable then it is now using single sata drives (3 per node).
Posted by JasonD10, 03-06-2011, 10:06 AM
At the moment I cannot go into details but there will be a large public case study on it once it goes public as we're building it for a high-profile website.
Posted by wartungsfenster, 03-06-2011, 10:18 AM
But almost all performance-centric Datacore setups sit in front of HP EVA (for lowend) or Hitachi AMS or UPS-V. Local storage is possible there but only used for very low end setups. So kinda contradictive? Pooling local storage (...is what I, too, plan, but) is only OK if you have a faily low IOPS requirement and are dead sure you'll never exceed it by a lot, whereas real storage arrays are build to run at full usage. a 6 year old CX700 in Raid1+0 will fail in MB/s throughput, but will just stomp on an IP San based setup in terms of latency and load. And the EMC CX is about the worst SAN array ever designed. When CephFS finally becomes stable there might be a game-changer as it can handle many 100k IOPS, but so far things will only look good as long you don't press them. My own setup is GlusterFS over Infiniband which is far more than what's possible in Applogic. And TBH, compared to any highend array it's making me sad. Edit: I should read slower and type less. You're right about more cost-effective. I just meant to say it's more cost-effective, but still not fully comparable unless the load put on it is carefully estimated.
Posted by wartungsfenster, 03-06-2011, 10:27 AM
sounds great:> how much longer do the enterprise models last for you until they should be wiped or replaced?
Posted by Dedicatedone, 03-06-2011, 11:06 AM
CloudWeb, have you tested this SSD setup yet?
Posted by JasonD10, 03-06-2011, 01:58 PM
Yes, it's been running in pre-production for 2+ months now.

Add to Favourites Print this Article