Howdy folks,
I work for a large company and manage our virtual infrastructure, quickly approaching 1000 vm's regionally, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000 vm's globally. Because we are a large corporation with multiple locations, many of which managed remotely, i've come to find common problems when standing up new hardware. While there are a variety of actions in place to resolve the root cause of the problems, i'm trying to find tools to help me find the problems quickly and effiiciently.
That said, i'm looking for a linux distribution thats small, supports the max 4 nic's of a given VM, and is relatively easy to configure or reconconfigure the network configuration.
Why? in several of my datacenters, my network admins who manage the edge switch port configurations struggle to get each one right. some of these port groups can get from 5 to 15 ports trunked into them. At the host end, we're grouping 3-4 nic's together to provide plentiful bandwidth, and cross card/cross bus/cross switch redundancy for each vswitch. My problem arises when a group of 4 nic's and their switch ports are configured, network admin A misses one vlan to add to the switch port. So it has vlan 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 (missed 7). The other 3 nic's in the group get configured properly. I won't find the problem until a virtual machine that needs that vlan, is moved to that host, AND is assigned to that physical nic.
This gets to be quite a little hassle to track down. So i'd like to have a little vm i can clone, windows is just too hard to get to a reasonably small size imho. I could then create a handful of vm's, each with 4 nic's configured to 4 of the 8 vlan's that cluster has vm networks for. Then each time a host is configured, i start the vm on it and ping the pre-defined testing IP's assigned to my vm. In my exmaple above, with 8 vlan's, i would have a static ip assigned to each of the 4 nics on 2 of my test vm's. A quick ping script would determine whether i'm getting appropriate traffic on the nic in question. from there, i simply add/remove adapters while running the ping script until all have been QA'd sat.
So, that turned out a lot longer than i expected. Any suggestions on a linux distro that i can keep small, and easily manage ip configurations?
