openSUSE admin

The database cluster behind http://download.opensuse.org/ has a new home: two machines with 24 CPU Cores and 128 GB RAM.

But the cluster is not running directly on this hardware - instead we have two virtual machines (KVM) that are currently just using 32 GB RAM and 10 CPUs each. This has some interesting benefits:

• Rebooting a virtual machines takes less than one minute. The old, bare metal systems took up to 10 minutes for a reboot. After that, the slave database needs ~5-10 minutes to resync with the master. So a complete "kernel update round" took ~30 minutes only for these two hosts in the past.
• If we need to reboot the underlying systems (the host), all virtual guests can be migrated without any downtime to the other host.
• We have enough free space for the migration of the web servers in front of the database (the ones every user reaches if he visits http://download.opensuse.org/ ) - so this will be the next step