VMs On The Edge

What started as a basic VM test has taken on a life of its own; it looks like we'll be walking the virtualization talk, pushing a VM host out near the edge of my production network. Wish me luck ...I wear many hats. One of them involves the care and feeding of a campus network. My organization is in the midst of planning a summer upgrade to fiber, Internet2, etc., via a zippy connection to CEN. While there eventually will be much rejoicing, we're spending a bunch of time redesigning our edge components to make sure our world keeps working when we cut over from our current last-mile providers.

To keep things under control on our existing ~17 Mbps in and ~3.5 Mbps out lines, we rely on a Squid proxy running on a 2.6 distro of Debian and a homegrown Perl-based "Exiler" traffic-shaping tool running on top of BSD 4. Exiler sits transparently on our default route while the Squid box is a sidestep off our core switch, annoyingly soaking up supervisor module CPU cycles under heavy traffic loads due to the loop-de-loop hops for cache misses. Damn you, iTunes U and your legitimate giant files.

So why am I writing about this in a virtualization blog? Stay with me.