[cfarm-users] Future of cfarm186/cfarm187/cfarm188 at OSUOSL

[Baptiste Jonglez]

On 21-01-26, Zach van Rijn wrote:
>  > (b) run virtualization ourselves on one of the big OSUOSL physical servers.
>  >     However, it requires more maintenance on our end (e.g. maintaining a
>  >     Proxmox setup),
> 
> This is fairly straightforward but inevitably is extra maintenance and the complexity can increase depending on storage/networking configurations. Maintenance is not bad.
> 
> One argument in favor of Proxmox (e.g.) is the ability to create both VMs (independent kernel) and containers (independent userland). In some cases, resources can be scaled up or down without rebooting.
> 
>  > and we probably won't be able to have a separate IP per
>  >     VM.  Also, it would waste hardware resources: even 10 VMs would be far
>  >     from filling up one server.
> 
> Why couldn't we do this? Each guest would have its own MAC address, so that can be done at either the network level or the hypervisor level if a block of IPs is assigned to the host.

Might be possible, but I don't know if this is standard OSUOSL offering.

We actually already run Proxmox with public IP addresses for cfarm26 and
cfarm27 at tetaneutral, but it's easy to get custom network config there.

>  > (c) find somebody that already has the expertise and infrastructure to run
>  >     VMs with unusual OS, and ask if they could provide some for cfarm.
>  >     Ideally, each VM would need its own public IP address.
> 
> Several of our hosts can likely already do this.
> 
> Adélie, for example, has adequate machine capacity but lacks IPv4 space only due to choice of ISP and project budget. At a previous data center, IP addresses were not a limitation. Unfortunately data center costs were unsustainable at that previous location due to demand.

I see.

>  > I would rather go with (a) for common OS and (c) for uncommon ones, and
>  > avoid (b).
> 
> In other words, you wish to avoid (b) due to not wanting to run/maintain Proxmox or VMware/etc.?
> 
> I am not volunteering myself to do this maintenance but I will say from having done this for ~15 years it is manageable for a single person and I am happy to educate others about it.

Yes, I should have said that I don't want to manage this myself ;)

>  > Here is the OS wishlist collected from the thread:
>  > 
>  > - Haiku, Minix, Hurd and Sortix (especially Hurd)
>  > - Trisquel
>  > - Illumos distributions (OpenIndiana, OmniOS, Tribblix)
>  > - Fedora or Gentoo
> 
> These seem reasonable but I am personally unfamiliar with Haiku. Instead, I have some questions:
> 
> 1. How much storage/disk/memory do you think each guest should have, and should there be shared storage between them?

TBD.  I would say no shared storage, it rather confuses things.

Of course the physical host can do thin provisioning on the storage side,
but this shouldn't be visible to the VMs.

> 2. Are you willing to update the deployment scripts to integrate with any of these, if they aren't already supported?

Yes, this is something I can commit to do (assuming of course it's possible).

> 3. Would it be acceptable for a VM host to not be involved with administration of each machine? I wouldn't want to force a host to suddenly be responsible for maintaining half a dozen new machines.

What do you mean here?

> > Here, "big" means dual-socket Intel Xeon Platinum 8280, so 56 cores / 112
> > threads, with 768 GB RAM. 
> 
> 4. This machine would be owned by and live at OSUOSL but we can do anything we want with it?

Yes, exactly the same hosting model as all current cfarm machines at
OSUOSL.  They manage everything physical and they initially install an OS,
and we then manage the OS / software as we want.

Baptiste