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Peter Petrakis wrote: > Suppose that you don't have an investment in AoE equipment; why > would one chose AoE over iSCSI? > Correct, I don't have any aoe equipment, nor do I have any iscsi equipment. And I don't imagine buying any of either. But that doesn't mean I can't use the *protocols*... What I am investigating is how to do a "smallish amount of serving" with completely redundant equipment. I do not like the idea of a single point of failure, even less do I like the idea of a specialized piece of hardware being a single point of failure. This means a specialized rack of disks bugs me because the rack itself becomes a failure point--unless I can afford two of them. In the "smallish amount of serving" department two complete disk racks is out of range. My current idea is two identical servers. Each capable of carrying the entire load alone, so the other is the spare. For $5K one can get a pretty decent machine (fast multicore CPU, lots of RAM, lots of disk). A second $5K buys the 100% redundant spare. And everything can fit in 2U. So far, so good. The fuzzy part comes in when I figure out how to quickly switch between physical machines. So maybe I make each machine an aoe target. The result would be that if the running machine goes down the spare could be fired up, already having a complete copy of the data the dead machine was using. As for what I would be serving, there would be some server consolidation going on here, probably as virtual machines under Virtualbox. What I am still trying to understand is how, when switching a VM from one physical server to another, to not have a nasty delay as a multi-gigabyte disk image is copied over. And, how to have resizable allocations between VMs. And, how to have software Raid 1 to protect me from a disk dying. And, have the ability to migrate one VM at a time, not just all-at-once. Stacking all that up in the right order is a puzzle. aoe might be part of the answer. As for trying aoe in person, it looks cool, but in my current distribution of choice (Ubuntu) aoe isn't playing nice with udev. A worry is that there might not be a critical mass around aoe, it might become an orphan. It seems to have been broken in Ubuntu for sometime and mostly no one noticed. As for iscsi, is it suitable for a computer-to-computer setup? (An appeal of aoe is that it has a shorter stack: it can't be routed, it is simple looking, it can use efficient jumbo packets that will fit just fine on a crossover cable running between the two servers.) -kb -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [hidden email] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
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