Hi there,
I'm a long time user of Xen virtualisation and have been evaluating
OpenVZ as a replacement for certain applications.
OpenVZ appears to be technically superior under certain conditions and I
hope to iron out the issues that I have come across.
The main issue confronting me at this time is scalability of management;
OpenVZ may scale well with respect to performance and resource usage but
at this time I don't see it scaling well when it comes to management of
virtual machines.
I am sure that I must be missing something obvious since its a pretty
basic issue. I've searched extensively for some info on this but found
nothing.
The problem?
Numeric rather than symbolic identification of virtual machines.
When I start a domU (a Xen virtual machine) in Xen I direct 'xm create'
at the config file the name of which corresponds to the name of that domU.
When I list currently running machines in Xen I see a listing of the
names of the Xen domUs and their corresponding numeric IDs.
When I create a logical volume for a Xen domU I create that volume based
on the name of the corresponding Xen instance.
In each case I try to ensure consistency by making the names of the Xen
domUs correspond to the hostnames of the servers which those domUs are
running. Host foo is on the domU named foo and is in a logical volume
named foo. To start domU foo I run 'xm create
/etc/xen/domains/foo.conf'. This scales well and makes things very nice
and obvious.
OpenVZ seems to do away with symbolic names referring in all instances
to numeric ids, a bit like not using DNS but putting an IP address into
a URL.
I have an awful feeling that when the pager goes off at 2am the person
on call, bleary-eyed and tired, will make some horrible mistake when
trying to mentally map numeric identifiers to server hostnames. This is
what I mean by 'not scaling well'. Use of numeric identifiers may work
ok when there is only one or two, but when there may be a dozen things
will get out of hand.
I am sure that there must be a way to use symbolic names instead of
numbers in OpenVZ but I can't for the life of me find out how.
Thanks!
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