We live in a world where internet users cannot tolerate even a few minutes of downtime. When Google or Twitter gets inaccessible even for a few seconds, it creates a havoc in the online world.

The reason why many web hosts now move to cloud solutions is to ensure high availability and minimal down time for their hosting. In our role as Outsourced hosting specialists for web hosts, we help setup and maintain suitable high availability solutions for them.

See how our WHMCS oVirt plugin helps you

In a virtualization system such as oVirt, we perform infrastructure management with the help of several “clusters” to which storage and compute devices can be added fairly easily.

VM cluster setup for high availability

For ensuring high availability in an oVirt system, we configure a highly available shared storage device, power management on all servers, and surplus resources on all servers to accommodate VMs from other servers.

A VM cluster is a group of hosts that share the same storage. To ensure high availability and easy fail over, we create multiple clusters in an ovirt system and assign the VMs to their corresponding host in a cluster.

By assigning multiple computing nodes and unique storage locations to each cluster, we ensure that all the clusters do not go down at the same time, thus ensuring high availability.

When one cluster goes down, the VMs in that cluster are allocated to another cluster with similar configuration and adequate resources. With proper resource planning and well-defined migration policy, we’re able to minimize the VM downtime.

[ Avoid the overhead involved in managing multiple interfaces! Get our WHMCS oVirt management plugin here. ]

Change VM cluster easily with the oVirt addon

Recently Bobcares launched a WHMCS oVirt plugin to assist web hosts by providing a easy-to-manage and feature-rich single interface where users can manage their oVirt VMs from the WHMCS itself.

In this WHMCS oVirt plugin, editing the VM cluster is a key feature we’ve incorporated. Web hosts or privileged VM owners can edit their virtual machine settings and move it to another cluster using the ‘Change Cluster‘ option.

Edit VM cluster

Users would be presented with a drop down menu with the available clusters from which they can choose from, and allocate their VM to the newly chosen cluster, from the window that comes up.

Select new VM cluster

For better resource management, ensuring high availability of VMs during a host downtime or regular maintenance task, this feature to edit the VM’s cluster and assign it to a different one, is very helpful.

The ‘Change Cluster’ feature is also used in cases where an infrastructure expansion is needed, in cases such as VM upgrade or plan upgrades and downgrades of specific VM owners.

[ Looking for custom plugins to manage your portals? Contact us to get tailor-made plugins to serve your business purposes. ]

The other major features of the WHMCS oVirt plugin include the options to create, edit, manage the VMs and their networks and other functions such as start, stop, reboot, rebuild, console and suspend VMs.

In addition to the already available feature list in the module, we also provide web hosts with the custom features and tweaks that they ask for. Bobcares’ expertise in various billing portals and management software, help us integrate these systems in very less time.

If you’d like to get a custom quote for integrating your VM management portal or other software systems into your billing system to make things easier for you and your customers, contact us now.