High performance XEN setup on ubuntu 8.04 (amd64)
This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install XEN on an Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) Server System (amd64) without compromising on disk I/O and network throughput. You can find all the software used here in the Ubuntu repositories, so no external files or source compilation are required.
Xen is an open-source para-virtualizing virtual machine monitor (VMM), or 'hypervisor', for the x86 processor architecture. Xen can securely execute multiple virtual machines on a single physical system with close-to-native performance. Xen facilitates enterprise-grade functionality, including:
- Virtual machines with performance close to native hardware
- Live migration of running virtual machines between physical hosts
- Up to 32 virtual CPUs per guest virtual machine, with VCPU hotplug
- x86/32, x86/32 with PAE, and x86/64 platform support
- Intel Virtualization Technology (VT-x) for unmodified guest operating systems (including Microsoft Windows)
- AMD Virtualization Technology (SVM aka Pacifica) on AM2 and F stepping Opterons (2006H2)
- Excellent hardware support (supports almost all Linux device drivers)
HAProxy and Keepalived for Highly Performance Load-Balancing on Ubuntu
This article explains how to set up a two-node based load balancers in an active/passive fashion, using HAProxy and keepalived on Ubuntu Server.
HAproxy is a high-performance and highly-robust HTTP and TCP load-balancer which provides cookie-based persistence, auto failover, header modification on the fly, weighted load balancing, advanced logging and many more more features. It can easily handle up to ten thousands hits per second on modern hardware(s), and even with thousands of simultaneous connections. Unlike other free load-balancing solutions, this product is used by a few hundreds of people around the world - but those people run very big sites serving several millions hits. But it's a too good piece of s/w - which getting popular very fast.
keepalived is to add a strong & robust keepalive facility to the HAProxy load-balancers (also known as directors). This is written in C with multilayer TCP/IP stack checks (Layer3, Layer4 & Layer5/7). Here in examples, Keepalived implements an independent VRRPv2 stack to handle HAproxy directors failover.