Project Shimla

January 15th, 2012

View Shimla changelog

“Shimla” is the name I gave to my project to build a decent server, which I could use to virtualise (virtualize if you’re American) a number of environments. The server had to be easly scalable, so CentOs and LVM was the perfect choice for a host operating system.

Why “Shimla”? Because it’s beautiful and takes your breath away!

xen-hypervisor-example

LVM – Physical Volumes added to Volume Groups:

[root@shimla xen]# pvs
PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/sda2 VolGroup00 lvm2 a- 465.66G 257.88G
/dev/sdb1 VolGroupXen00 lvm2 a- 465.76G 145.76G

LVM – Logical Volumes added to Volume Groups:

[root@shimla xen]# lvs
LV VG Attr LSize Origin Snap% Move Log Copy% Convert
LogVol00 VolGroup00 -wi-ao 200.00G
LogVol01 VolGroup00 -wi-ao 7.78G
XenLogVol00 VolGroupXen00 -wi-a- 10.00G
XenLogVol01 VolGroupXen00 -wi-a- 100.00G
XenLogVol02 VolGroupXen00 -wi-a- 200.00G
XenLogVol03 VolGroupXen00 -wi-ao 10.00G
[root@shimla xen]#

It is possible to create Logical Volumes of varying size and use these as the Xen Virtual Machines disk volumes. This means that if you wish to increase, decrease, add to or remove storage to a Virtual Machine, this can be achieved withour needing to reformat the VM filesystem.

Elastix PBX Virtual Machine using Xen Logical Volume:(10GB if you refer to above output)

[root@shimla xen]# cat Elastix-PBX | awk -F “:” ‘/phy:/ {print $2}’
/dev/VolGroupXen00/XenLogVol03,hda,w”, “,hdc
[root@shimla xen]#

Windows Server Virtual Machine using Xen Logical Volume:(200GB if you refer to above output)

[root@shimla xen]# cat WinSvr-2k8R2 | awk -F “:” ‘/phy:/ {print $2}’
/dev/VolGroupXen00/XenLogVol02,hda,w”, “file
[root@shimla xen]#

System Specification – plus links to purchase(a few pennies earned helps to pay for the thing!)

Motherboard RAM CPU DVD
Storage Chassis Filesys Hypervisor
500GB-Seagate-Momentus
2 x Seagate Momentus
500GB Hybrid SSD
(1TB Storage)
LVM Xen

High Air Flow Tower

Comments are closed.