[mdlug] NAS Recommendations

[Carl T. Miller]

Robert Adkins II wrote:
> 	It sounds like you have some experience in the Synology devices.
> Would you be able to walk me through how that device would work in this
scenario and or maybe the better way to configure things for this
scenario?

I've only used ReadyNAS, but the concepts should be the same.

> 	What I would need to be able to do if the host server dies is have a
> back-up server turned on and then remotely or walk a neophyte through
booting and starting up the VMs and have those VMs mount up the
necessary drives and create as "seamless" as possible a changeover.

First you would need a shared filesystem to hold the
configurations for the VMs.  I'd suggest using nfs v3,
although samba or nfs4 should work just as well.

You would then create one iscsi target for each of the
VMs.  This will be the virtual hard drive within the VM.

Configure your first host to automount the shared file-
system and configure libvirt to use this location.
Create your VMs, using the iscsi target instead of a
file.  Verify that everything works as expected.

The last step is to set up the second host to automount
the shared filesystem and configure libvirt to use it.
You should see the same VMs available with the same
definitions.  Obviously you should never power up the
same VM on two hosts!  Shutdown the VM on the first
host and see that it can come up on the second.

c