Test Lab Begins To Form

We're taking our first baby steps as gear starts to arrive for our virtualization test lab. To get things rolling, we've fired up a couple of open-source platforms while we wait for our our ESX testbed to arrive. So... we had a couple of older, non-VT Dell servers racked and idle in the lab, just waiting for a non-VT virtualization solution.

We had never played around with OpenVZ, so the time seemed right to build out a Linux-only box for a number of planned VMs, or VEs - Virtual Environments - in VX-speak. I'm a big fan of open source solutions and I have been wanting to play around with OpenVZ to see if the efficiency claims (1%-3% overhead) hold up in the real world.

FYI, SWSoft bases its commercial Virtuozzo product offerings on OpenVZ. It supports the open source VZ project much the same as XenSource helps out the Xen development effort.

VZ does not do Windows; hosts and all guests need to be Linux. We went with the latest stable Debian build for all instances, and had OpenVZ installed and running 4 VEs in an afternoon: two Radius servers, a PostgreSQL DB, and an Apache Web server. The host box is dual core Intel with 2 Gbytes of RAM, relying on a combination of local storage and NFS mounts to NAS storage for the DB and Web content.

The Radius VEs now provide authentication for our production campus wireless (~600 users) infrastructure without a problem. We'll be ramping up production traffic on the web server.We cloned VEs and restored a couple of timed to get our Radius configs right, and everything seems to be working at the moment. So far, so good.

Stay tuned for performance update on our VZ box. We plan to upgrade our existing two XenEnterprise HP/AMD servers to the latest rev this week, and the gear for our ESX environment should be on site by the end of the month.