[Linux-cluster] clustering inside of vmware -- fencing

[Andrew A. Neuschwander]

VMware::VmPerl.pm a deprecated api. The current vmware perl api is the 
VI Perl Toolkit (VMware::VIM2Runtime). I have a centos 5.2 gfs cluster 
running in a VMware ESX cluster (with virtualcenter). I have a mix of 
CentOS VMs and physical machines participating in the GFS cluster.

I modified the fence_vixel agent to use this new api, and called it 
fence_vi3. It's fairly basic and works, but could use some improvements. 
I've been using it for almost a year:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/cluster-devel/2007-November/msg00056.html

The old fence_vmware agent logs into a single ESX/GSX server using the 
old api and resets the targeted guest. fence_vi3 logs into the 
VirtualCenter and resets the requested VM. This is needed in a ESX 
cluster, since you don't know on which ESX machine your Centos/Rhel 
guest is running.

I don't know if this is a supported setup, but it works. I've done a lot 
of heavy testing and optimizing of gfs in this setup. My volume group 
which hold my gfs filesystems is 14TB and has been in production for a 
good 6 months. Obviously, YMMV.

-Andrew
--
Andrew A. Neuschwander, RHCE
Linux Systems/Software Engineer
College of Forestry and Conservation
The University of Montana
http://www.ntsg.umt.edu
andrew at ntsg.umt.edu - 406.243.6310


Terry Davis wrote:
> Hello,
> I am trying to set up a RHEL5 cluster inside of VMware (client request).  I
> see there are hints of a fence_vmware script floating around.  I found one
> on sources.redhat.com but this, coupled with the latest toolkit from vmware
> yields a missing VMware::VmPerl.pm file.  This got me to step back and think
> about this a bit further.
> 
> 1) is this a supported configuration?
> 2) what am I missing with the fence_vmware script?
> 3) can anyone share any working configurations with this?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> 
> 
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