Tag: Xen

Categories
Cloud End User internet

tref moves into the cloud

Stop right there! Before you go any further I know what you are going to say. “I’ve always had my head in the cloud”.

But no 🙂 . What I mean is that we are just moving trefor.net into the cloud. More specifically onto a Xen based virtual server on a resilient hardware cluster. I might say this is to cope with the increasing load imposed by the growing number of visitors but this isn’t totally true, or not at least the main driver.

As much as anything you have to practice what you preach and on this occasion this is what I am doing. Thanks to Ian P. Christian (Pookey) for his help with this.

I can see clearly now the cloud has come…

trefor.net moves into the cloud

Categories
Engineer virtualisation

Virtual Machines for Email Platform

We have stepped up our use of Virtual Machines at network level at Timico and recently rolled out a significant number of Xen based platforms. Xen (see Xen.org).  For those that don’t know a Virtual Machine is a virtual server that can run on multiple hardware devices simultaneously but can be seen as a single entity by the network. 

Because the company has been growing the need to scale up easily has become more and more pressing. Over the Christmas break (the Network Operations team is allowed two hours off for Christmas lunch which they take communally in the kitchen at the NOC 🙂 ) a new email platform was rolled out on Xen based hardware. As the burden of mail inevitably grows all Timico will have to do is add new hardware capacity with no need for network downtime or reengineering.

The beauty of Xen is that it takes very little time to add capacity to a server farm and downtime is minimal or non existent. You can therefore move a service from a small machine to a more powerful one with perhaps as little as 60 milliseconds interruption. 

All new servers are rolled out with Xen now at Timico. Whilst Xen is open source  and therefore free Citrix does sell a commercial version. If you have no skills in this space it could be an option but otherwise drop me a line if you want any advice on the subject.