Viewing entries tagged with 'network'
Migrate Paravirtualized Xen to KVM under RHEL
Update July 11, 2009: Re-registering VMs at RHN uses an extra entitlement with RHEL5.4Beta
Update July 15, 2009: Swap usage, clock and disk cache of the virtual machine
Update July 16, 2009: Replace virsh create with virsh define & start to create a managed domain and not a transient one
Update September 2, 2009: Re-registering with RHN works
Update September 2, 2009: RHEL5.4 has been released. Added a note about services on the physical host
Update September 6, 2009: Updating TimeKeeping and Hugepages
Does TCP/IP have a future?
Network Convergence is a hot topic nowadays. This is driven mostly by storage networking. The first products which can deliver Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) are starting to appear even now. There are a couple of drivers for developing Ethernet for storage networks:
- Ethernet development is ahead of Fibre Channel and Infiniband in terms of speed
- Common network layer simplifies infrastructure management
- Reduction in the number of network interfaces and thus initial hardware cost
Switch Mishmash
Last week, I stumbled upon an interesting problem. One of the projects I'm working on as an astronomical sensor grid, putting out about 2.6Gb/s of data per sensor station, coupled to a central super computing infrastructure. This system is still in the buildup/tender phase, so the network consists of networking equipment of various brands, to test out what the differences are and how well they work together. There are only 5 sensor stations at the moment, so the total amount of data is manageable. In the future the total data stream will grow to about 1Tb/s, to be processed real time.
High Speed Firewalling in Linux
In this age of virtualization, cluster and grid applications, the load on the server network interface tends to increase. Multi-homed servers were rare not more than 5 years ago, nowadays servers come with 4 NICs pre-installed. This, of-course, increases complexity and network cost. Today I made a proposal for a couple of servers with more than 10 Gigabit interfaces. With the current state of technology, we are approaching the break even point for 10 Gigabit network interfaces. This year will see the breakthrough of 10Gigabit over copper in the datacentre.
