New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
IWSTACK new zone available
According to email received from them IWSTACK has a new deploy zone MILANO/DC2/XEN. It is located in another data center in the Milan campus and composed of XEN hypervisors only. New hosts are powered by dual E5-2680 2.7 Ghz, dual port 8 Gbps fiber channel HBA.
Thanks to IWSTACK for their great service!
Comments
For current customers, there is also a discount 25% to any credits will be bought during September, as a promotional offer for their new DC/virtualization. Kudos @Maounique @Prometeus
25% discount comes in at a perfect time. I was just about to get more credits in!
me too, i tried deploying an instance of ubuntu 14 and seems pretty fast...
the most interesting thing to me is
Instances support VM snapshots, in addition to the usual volume snapshots. These snapshot allow you to restore an instance to a previous running state (useful to have before a system upgrade or dangerous tasks).
Seems like a good time to move everything to the cloud!
Someone was not happy, we received 20G+ of 3 kinds of DDoS, NTP, DNS and ICMP. I wonder if this is related.
The templates are not ready yet, I will be adding those with random password at install and support for password change. No more support for small instances below 1 G and only 64 Bit templates as this is intended almost exclusively for professional usage, hence the choice of Xen.
The snapshot support is due to Xen Hypervisor, KVM did not support it. We may add a vmware zone sometimes in the future, but not decided yet. It depends on how much professional usage the cloud will see, it has grown explosively lately, some 6 months ago, the hobbysts were the majority with a few instances, now the people with tens of euros spent a day are the majority in the total charges (not absolute numbers, hehe)
@Maounique yes i noticed about less templates, i tried installing ISO and things were smooth. All the best!
Will a more powerful set of CPUs be deployed in the KVM zone in the near future? IIRC they are 2620s
Yes, they are:
The KVM zone is for flexibility and hobbists, with light professional usage, as professional usage grew, we thought about expanding to another, more powerful SAN, higher count and higher power CPUs and Xen virtualization to address the needs of professionals.
TBH we did not expect the cloud for the masses to attract high numbers of professionals, we have our vmware and rhev clouds for those, but apparently, there is a middle range of smaller businesses which cannot afford to pay thousands a month for a proprietary solution and do not need such power and all the features. It seems iwstack is the right balance between the low and high end of the market, the area we were not covering before.
It was my belief that KVM offers more control and flexibility compared with Xen, particularly because of its full hardware virtualization.
I generally prefer KVM because I can use an ISO of virtually any OS to install and configure and repair broken stuff the way I want.
Has Xen caught up in this regards, or is it mainly for more experienced users with well tuned and settled configurations, given that Xen has been around much longer than KVM, like being deployed at Amazon instance?
I'd just like to know why you consider Xen to be more professional, whether it is due to its technical merits or the kind of users that prefer it.
Most new cloud businesses also seem to prefer KVM on Openstack.
Not really, depends on what you use. When he talks about CloudStack and Xen he means XenServer because XenServer is only supported in CloudStack from the Xen family. XenServer also supports all feature that KVM offers and such more features than KVM in CloudStack. The main platform is XenServer for CloudStack at the moment and this will not change in the near future. KVM do not have any cluster mechanism to built failover cluster for HA which have not a problem with split brains and other issues.
We using in our enterprise cloudstack environment only XenServer for stability, performance and feature set reasons. KVM do not have any cluster features and you can get trouble if you loose a part of the fake KVM cluster. So KVM is currently not an alternative to replace XenServer if you want a stable and fast HA cluster with failover functions.
Other example is SDN, SDN plugins only work probably with XenServer at the moment which is necessary to provide thousands of complete isolated private networks with GRE, VXLAN or STT.
Yes, i can confirm that. Midrange professional clouds are grown great in the last months. We covering a big part of KMUs here in germany with a CloudStack + XenServer solution für midrange prices which is not official announced or published yet. There is currently a big hole between cheap fake clouds (DO,..) and enterprise clouds with a complete SDN solution.
I have never used iwstack before. Do they do referral/affiliate links? Seems like a waste not to give someone some $ if so
We have a limited program for old customers due to possible abuse. In general, we would like to be known for our quality and features rather than cheap or free service, despite the fact that our prices are well below average for the quality and features we offer.
@fileMEDIA
When I pushed Uncle to deliver a real cloud I felt the time for it came and was thinking exactly about this mid range usage. However, since we had a lot of setbacks and Uncle was really pressed that time due to some problems at his job, we put up together a few experiments and, because KVM was in demand here and we are not really advertising some other place, we tried to see if it floats with KVM.
It did, after a slow start, we suddenly saw an increase at the beginning of the year, about february-march and a couple of weeks ago we began to have growth issues with secondary storage running out and too many small instances and volumes we didnt plan to have. The Xen zone was planned for some time and we delivered it in a hurry now to allow the biz range customers to find the stability, features and performance they were seeking in an IaaS cloud. We planned that the Biz customers will migrate to Xen freeing some capacity for hobbists and devs in the KVM sector, effectively expanding AND offering more features and choice with a single investment.
I must admit we were not fully prepared and the explosive growth (last 2 months had some 50% usage increase month to month) and there were vacations etc so it might have a few rough edges, such as the lack of templates and ISOs. They will be added in the next week-10 days.
One thing I wish to make clear.
This is not the regular Xen-PV we deliver for our VPS customers, based on the stable and tested Centos 5, but a whole new mixed PV-HVM environment made possible by the Citrix's XenServer orchestrated by Cloudstack which has the roots in the Citrix labs.
You CAN use ISOs, you can upload own, you can use windows, BSD, etc. Our templates will be PV where possible, but HVM is there if you wish to use a fully virtualized envronment.
Please, if you will use it, do not forget to install xen tools, without them, the instances will behave erratically and will refuse to migrate or even shutdown gracefully in some situations, so, please install xen tools if you do not use our templates.
@Maounique
We didn't used KVM hypervisors with CloudStack in production. We had some problems in our test pods to guarantee HA and failover if a KVM node loose his network connection but the VMs are already running on this node. CloudStacks detect it as down and restart the VM on a new node. If the node comes back you get in trouble because of two running instances at the same time. Split brain..This issue is already documented in the documentation of CloudStack and can avoid by using XenServer (includes own cluster management).
Only problem or small higher workload is to compile the network card and infiniband drivers for the Dom0 kernel. Each update requires a recompilation for the kernel driver modules and few weeks of tests. This is required because the Chelsio network cards and infiniband card drivers are not built into the standard kernel..So each update of XenServer kernel in our production environment requires at least three weeks to test the network and infiniband drivers for stability and performance problems.
CloudStack + XenServer and 10GBe and/or Infiniband for storage is the best solution for midrange priced private clouds at the moment. You doing exactly the same as we doing, i think is time to release the CloudStack environment for all public customers to start a small alternative
Do you use the SDN + open vswitch plugins for network overlays? We use it because, 4k VLANs are not enough.
This is not true. Atleast not in a general statement. This is only true for 'CloudStack'. However OpenStack, OpenNebula, and other cloud orchestration platforms, support HA and auto failover with KVM, and it works well. My KVM clusters are utilizing HA and auto failover, and KVM performs beautifully.
So I could run KVM in these XEN boxes and OpenVZ in KVM?
Holy...
Well, HVM mimics a full hardware box, so in theory, with cpu direct access, it should be possible to run a proxmox, certainly the ovz part will work, kvm too without virtualization support, it remains to be seen if it can with virtualization support, but I bet it can be made to work after some poking around. It is cute... BUT IT'S WRONG!
We had the issue with network failure (a card malfunctioned flooding the network) which forced thousands of instances to restart on other nodes taking some 12 hours. It did not generate a split brain situation, though, because the network problem prevented the affected nodes to come back until an operator intervened and solved both problems at once, shutting down the nodes too.
To avoid this in the future, now the network connection to the orchestrator takes an internal route too.
Well, then I can directly run OVZ on these. What would you recommend CPU/I/O wise, the XEN or the KVM servers? I'm planning on running some VMs entirely on swap, as they wouldn't use much I/O and don't need to be very responsive.
No, KVM and libvirt do not offer any kind of integrated cluster management. This is only implemented at application level like OpenStack or OpenNebula does. But the hypervisor do not have any heartbeat or checking function and cannot detect any kind of failures. If you lose your management server (openstack,..) and a compute node a split brain is also happen or failover does not work.
With XenServer you have both, XenServer cluster and the CloudStack management server. You have failover and cluster management at two level instead of one.
But all solutions can fail XenServer, VMware, KVM,..no solution can avoid all failures.
@Maounique
Will new customers that sign up in September be able to take advantage of the 25% discount after the initial purchase of credits?
In theory, yes, but you will need to know the code :P
@Maounique
Ah, I see. Can it be requested through email/ticket?
@sumo
It's coming with the email for current or exsting iwstack user
Even better, thank you for letting me know.
Even better you can use my affiliate code
Was about to place an order. Forgot about the €30 entrance fee. Does the promo work on the initial €30 as well or just for subsequent credits? If it works for the initial €30, does anyone have a code they would be willing to share with me?
That is not a fee, it is the initial deposit. You will get 30 credits for those money.
No, the promo does not apply at the initial purchase, it is for existing customers to encourage them to test and migrate to the new zone given the advantages it has.
Remember, this is not intended for hobbists, it is a midway between our high end services and the low end market. Not proprietary vmware or rhev but opensource all the way. Not everyone affords the thousands a month corporations pay for the proprietary clusters and not everyone needs those certifications, have internal audits and rules requiring them. This zone is for those professionals, it was designed with them in mind.
There are no 384 or 512 MB instances possible, templates, the few that are present, require 60 GB virtual drives, the storage is 4-8 times as fast depends on what you test, the network is better, it is Xen, etc. We will continue to support the KVM zone, but we will likely restructure it as it grew somewhat chaotically. There should be no downtime, though, as live migration is fully supported.
I understand about the initial deposit, entrance fee probably wasn't the best description on my part.
So the new zone only allows instances with 1GB+ RAM in XEN? Is the pricing the same as what's stated on the website?
Was iwStack initially designed for hobbyists/developers, but found a market for professional/business use and that's what prompted the new data center deployment? I didn't realize you offered VMware and RHEV as well since I couldn't find links on your site. From my impression of prometeus.net, I thought your market segments were hobbyists, developers, professionals, and small business, but not medium and large businesses.
You must be new here. Prometeus is a professional host since 1997, with focus on media and financial companies hosting, mainly streaming lately.
The entry in this le market was some fun project of Salvatore which liked this site. It was supposed to use leftovers from the main business and it did but soon there was a need to grow and since he had a lease to do for some equipment got more for this too and it kept growing then some semi-pro people joined in and they needed more, then we launched the Biz line, then we were thinking about a cheap cloud version which hobbists and semi-pro would like and this brought iwstack after a long wait of more than a year in which it went through a lot of trials and attempts and picked KVM because it fit low and low to mid range customers which like KVM over Xen for some reason. It also happened to just work so we were in a hurry and gave up xenserver which had some issues at first.
However, we are both Xen fans and did not abandon the idea and as soon as the KVM zone started to show saturation signs, rushed the Xen zone so the pro people will move there freeing some resources for the LE crowd. Even so, the 384 MB instances are not available anymore in the KVM area, it starts from 512 now at least until there are some more resources free able to take the load that small instances with small disks generate.
The stories are long and told elsewhere but the main business does not make offers through the web, there are negotiations face to face, custom solutions and clusters, it is a whole different thing, it even involves dark fiber to spain and france in cases.
Yes, relatively new. Thank you for taking the time to explain. I've heard of many good things about Prometeus, but the specifics were usually vaguely referenced. Its clearer now.