I have been working on building a small self contained management and monitoring physical stack. This is to be used as an Out-Of-Band (OOB) management / monitoring (MM) solution for a larger storage / compute stack.
The MM solution uses three 1U Lanner NCA-5510 Network Appliance, each with one boot flash and two SSD harddrives. Three 8-port copper 1G modules are installed along with one 4-port 10G SFP+ XL710 module. The 1G modules are for connecting to management devices and ports, while the 10G module is used to interconnect each of the three appliances to each other and to the main set of two switches.
An integrated series of open source packages are used to handle shared storage, routing, and virtualization:
- Open vSwitch - switching, OpenFlow, and netflow
- Free Range Routing - OSPF/BGP/EVPN dynamic routing
- ZFS - stripes the two SSD drives, and provides data integrity
- Corosync - consistency layer for Sheepdog
- Sheepdog - uses 2:1 erasure coding for data redundancy and availability over the three nodes
- libvirt - manages virtualization guests
- Qemu/Kvm - virtualization for Windows based guests
- LXC - pseudo virtualization for native Linux tools
This is a start of a series of articles recording some of the key configurations for portions of this project, as the configuration files for this sort of topology are not well documented elsewhere.