Nodeweaver
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I was researching on the web and I stumbled on a company called "node weaver". Anyone ever heard of them. It looks like a software based HCI that you can put on your own hardware. I am inquiring me to find out, however I am just curious if anyone has heard and or used them.
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Yup, they've been around. There is lots of HCI to put on your own hardware. LOTS of it. The problem is, all of it relies on Gluster or CEPH which most people don't want to use because it is convoluted and slow. NodeWeaver uses CEPH. It's probably perfectly nice, but it's just KVM + CEPH, which you already have.
So the question becomes... why? This falls 100% into the "who cares" category. I already have KVM with CEPH and I don't want it in more enterprise configurations. So why would I want it packaged by a company that no one knows or uses? What's the upside? What overcomes the downsides? And if you think this is acceptable, why not use ProxMox that does the same thing and people know way better and has already been discussed? Or just install your own since every Linux distro does all that already.
I think you are looking for a silver bullet that doesn't exist. Hyperconvergence isn't hard, unique, expensive, or new. It's absolutely everywhere. It's built into almost everything. But what you really want, I think, is something both ridiculously easy like Scale (no other HC does that) or that has performance like Starwind or Scale, and no low cost freebie product does that.
Bottom line, if you are okay with complex and/or slow, you are flooded with options and there is no need to do any more research. If you want really simple or really fast, your choices are Starwind or Scale and there is no need to do any more research.
Those are the options out there.
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Update, I had a convo with Nodeweaver, They do not use Gluster or CEPH. They have their own. They have some pretty cool stuff. Pricing model is 1600 per node. That is a perpetual license.
They do have a monthly plan 99 per node comes with next day support. 8x5. then 149 per node 24/7 support.
The software can mix and match hardware, use any type of harddrive, servers etc. When the system detects a new node it will automatically load balance. How long ago did you look at Nodeweaver @scottalanmiller
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@mroth911 said in Nodeweaver:
They have their own.
How does it work? Is it any good? When I looked it up, it was listed as CEPH under the hood.
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@mroth911 said in Nodeweaver:
How long ago did you look at Nodeweaver @scottalanmiller
When you asked about it, I looked it up again. I knew about it from before, but hadn't looked to see whose storage they were using.
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Ah, they've updated stuff. This is what their site says: "NodeWeaver takes advantage of an extremely sophisticated and flexible storage layer, based largely on the LizardFS distributed filesystem, and capable of performing reliably and in an extremely efficient way even for small number of nodes and disk drives."
You can always do LizardFS yourself for free, just like Gluster or CEPH.
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So LizardFS is a clustered file system. So that makes this work as a vSAN like Starwind does, rather than as a native storage layer like Scale does. Both approaches have their benefits. So with LizardFS, this is the filesystem than you just do iSCSI on top of it. Starwind brings a ton of their own tech at the iSCSI layer to make that efficient. Scale bypasses that to get around it.
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I am in the process of installing it and giving it a try. The demo seems very good. A lot different then scale, you can map to local storage. Create virtual networks within the cluster, spin up certain application and have them load in a certain order. I would take a look at it and see try the demo.
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@mroth911 said in Nodeweaver:
I am in the process of installing it and giving it a try. The demo seems very good. A lot different then scale, you can map to local storage. Create virtual networks within the cluster, spin up certain application and have them load in a certain order. I would take a look at it and see try the demo.
Scale is all local storage under normal conditions. Starwind is always local.
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@mroth911 said in Nodeweaver:
I am in the process of installing it and giving it a try. The demo seems very good. A lot different then scale, you can map to local storage. Create virtual networks within the cluster, spin up certain application and have them load in a certain order. I would take a look at it and see try the demo.
Other than a unified interface to it, what does this give me that free Ubuntu or Fedora doesn't?
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If it is LizardFS that you like, they have Proxmox integration...
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I honestly don't know the answer to this question yet. I installed it. was very straight forward, Mixes and matches hardware, auto load balancing hot swap drives. So your telling me I can build promos with lizard fs
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Had a look at nodeweaver's website - https://www.nodeweaver.eu
It looks interesting. They have a clear edge computing, IoT, Industry 4.0 focus on their product and their customers. So it's not a generic IT HCI product but rather geared towards those types of applications.
So what's the difference really? Well, the difference is that it's probably going to be managed by technicians and not IT. So it's design is likely geared towards easy of use and stability rather than towards bleeding edge features and lots of settings.
And also possibly tuned to run on very modest hardware as that is common feature of edge devices. It's also very likely that it is tuned for deterministic real time applications, which is common on edge devices and IIoT. KVM has PREEMPT-RT which are patches to give better performance for real time applications. Basically you want to know that an application will respond within a certain time, every time, regardless of what it is doing.
So this could be a good thing or a bad thing. Most things like real time patches improves things where it is needed but doesn't cause much performance loss where it is not needed. Anyway, as a product I think if you want a turn-key system it will probably be a good fit. If you want to be able to tinker with everything it will probably not be the right choice.
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@mroth911 said in Nodeweaver:
I honestly don't know the answer to this question yet. I installed it. was very straight forward, Mixes and matches hardware, auto load balancing hot swap drives. So your telling me I can build promos with lizard fs
Right, you could build all this without Nodeweaver. Not to knock on NW, I'm sure that they are fine. But like FreeNAS, it's unclear what they are adding to the existing capabilities we already choose not to use normally.
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@Pete-S said in Nodeweaver:
So it's not a generic IT HCI product but rather geared towards those types of applications.
I did notice that, but am assuming that that is mostly marketing.
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So what do I need to build a nice ui. Easy to setup and manage. What do I need to do and how to build it.
I know I can’t build scale.
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@mroth911 said in Nodeweaver:
So what do I need to build a nice ui. Easy to setup and manage. What do I need to do and how to build it.
I know I can’t build scale.
..............
You don't. That's why businesses like Scale exist.
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@JaredBusch Unfortunately at this time scale is out of the budget at the moment so I have to look at other technologies to keep things afloat
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@mroth911 said in Nodeweaver:
@JaredBusch Unfortunately at this time scale is out of the budget at the moment so I have to look at other technologies to keep things afloat
I'm guessing that's why a question like your is most often asked - budget.
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@scottalanmiller said in Nodeweaver:
@mroth911 said in Nodeweaver:
I honestly don't know the answer to this question yet. I installed it. was very straight forward, Mixes and matches hardware, auto load balancing hot swap drives. So your telling me I can build promos with lizard fs
Right, you could build all this without Nodeweaver. Not to knock on NW, I'm sure that they are fine. But like FreeNAS, it's unclear what they are adding to the existing capabilities we already choose not to use normally.
Not really. Libvirt doesn't have the ability natively to automatically fail over between systems. You'll have to set up corosync/pacemaker or keepalived, something along those lines. Out of the box you can transfer VMs as long as they share storage, but it doesn't auto fail over. It also doesn't have a feature complete web UI yet. You can't spin up certain systems in a specific order (which was mentioned) and is important for some legacy applications. Libvirt definitely does not auto balance like mentioned before either, you would have to write that yourself. You also don't have a shared network between hosts either. You would have to manually set that up as well. Then you have to maintain all of that on top of maintaining the guests.
