Cloude Hosting providers who provide true HA / FT

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Posted by jay23, 06-22-2011, 12:12 PM
Not the 10 min downtime while the VM is being botted on another box. For example any providers who provide Vmware-FT as an option ?
Posted by JasonD10, 06-22-2011, 01:11 PM
VMWare FT is nice in theory, but imho not so much in practice. Why? Here's a few reasons 1) It's creating a second, live operating environment utilizing signifiantly more CPU, RAM, and bandwidth. (waste, so you'll spend more) 2) It's just a read-only instance it cannot be actively used for load balancing or a true clustered HA hosting scenario. (again waste, spend more for less functionality) 3) It's not as reliable as a Cluster. In early testing it has been found that there have been numerous consistency issues with large applications. Bring in issues 1 and 2 and you are wasting a lot of money, for inferior technology. The VMWare FT feature is nice for low-level applications and small VM's for quick HA functionality but when any serious application needs HA, Clustering is the way to go. You can Cluster on the cloud, and have all the benefits of true HA as you have active, USABLE, secondary VM's that are load balanced, and redundant just the same. 100% uptime and much better scalability can be achieved this way. With VMWare FT your vertical limitations are still that of one single physical server, Clustering there is no vertical limitation.
Posted by Wavendon Internet, 06-22-2011, 01:25 PM
Try Genesis Hosting (www.genesishosting.com). Eric there is great and they will do pretty much anything you ask for with vSphere.
Posted by jay23, 06-22-2011, 01:29 PM
The issue is not all apps are cluster aware. 1. Ever Run Mx 2. Stratus ftServer (Model 2600 is not expensive when you add up total cost) 3. Stratus also has Avance High-Availability Software are some of the options, we use #2 now Jay
Posted by wartungsfenster, 06-22-2011, 03:36 PM
Woah. Sorry to say but I don't think you'll find any current hoster that could compare to running on a ftServer. I'd love to provide such hosting based on Xen/Remus (similar to everrun), but this is not possible in a startup-like environment, I'd have to be running a few years already, have 4-10 outstanding admins, and even then you need to consider that outside of the telco space there's no linux flavours that even closely fit for that kind of uptime. Montavista has integrated KVM into their carrier grade linux but a SDK with one - two dev licenses will surely run > $20k. Given a rough estimate I'd end off with a $10k-$12k/y price tag for hosting a single such VM with proper SLA. I figure you know MTBF calculations a little, in practice one would have to host on either ftserver or some telco grade stuff, and run a cloud on that. It would be a sustainable business since like always, systems aren't fully loaded at all times One more issue is that the current VM schedulers are not really reliable in their QoS. There's a RT kernel for Xen i think and it doesn't work except on non-SMP hosts... And, hell, not sure what the business insurance would run for that lol if you ran multiple HA customers in one cloud. As it would be a risk center, and even a prime target for anything evil. One would have to colo at a *real* datacenter. ^^ But it'd be fun.
Posted by wartungsfenster, 06-22-2011, 03:41 PM
It's not just about cluster awareness - Clusters normally dont get uptimes close to what stratus sells. And even with "mirrored VMs" I don't think you'll find a single VMWare farm that has a better-than-5-nines uptime. Attached Thumbnails
Posted by jay23, 06-22-2011, 03:47 PM
This is where some thing like ftServer make sense, you can get their low end model for under 20K. It looks and act just like your PC.
Posted by jay23, 06-22-2011, 03:48 PM
Here is a good deal, if the system is in working order http://cgi.ebay.com/Stratus-ftServer...item587fc62ee7
Posted by wartungsfenster, 06-22-2011, 03:49 PM
With the exception that NEVER, EVER, a tech comes around unasked for when my PC fan fails
Posted by jay23, 06-22-2011, 03:55 PM
Sad part is I have seen people running one of these boxes in the office environment where power is the single point of failure.
Posted by wartungsfenster, 06-22-2011, 05:39 PM
So jay, what would you figure a tolerable price for a HA (Cloud) VPS, - with downtime in the 30-15min/y range. - with 5-nines-ish 1min/y Let's assume it would be less powerful than a normal ftserver, like 4 cores, 8GB Ram, otherwise I imagine the syncing traffic will be an issue even with infiniband. The usual cloud advantages of utility billing might still be there, and most importantly, it could be deployed within minutes and disbanded within 1-2 days (technically you could just shut it down, but in HA env you'd have to ensure all admins are informed that "these 60 VMs are offline from tomorrow".
Posted by boskone, 06-24-2011, 03:39 AM
You achieve no downtime you need to deploy multiple cloud servers across multiple hypervisors with load balancing and cluster / automation. Plenty of clouds offering 'enterprise' credentials with impeccable uptime records.. you still can't survive a physical HV failure if you've a single VM running.
Posted by wartungsfenster, 06-24-2011, 04:05 PM
Well the main idea was to have no downtime even if a host fails And, just like Amazons cloud it's not really saying much if there is "no downtime" since the cloud has been up when it's only been up for a year or two. Amazon had virtually no downtime until it went down ^^
Posted by Stratogen, 06-25-2011, 03:20 AM
You need to run two virtual machines in two datacentres with geographic load balancing to achieve this. VMware HA (High Availability) will provide a very good level of resilience anyway, so ask yourself if the extra cost is worth the possible minute of downtime. If it is, then it's quite straightforward to setup the environment you are looking for.
Posted by sailor, 06-25-2011, 07:31 AM
how big is your environment? there are a couple of providers that can do this depending on your size.

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