Ⅱ-8. Accelerator

RIKEN Accel. Prog. Rep. 47 (2014)

Upgrading the server system using virtualization technology
in the RIBF control system
A. Uchiyama,∗1 M. Komiyama,∗1 and N. Fukunishi∗1
In an RIBF control system, the Experimental
Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) has
been introduced on Linux and vxWorks since 20011) .
Owing to a centralized management system, all computers for EPICS programs share common network
storage that implements a ﬁle transfer protocol (FTP)and a network ﬁle system (NFS) as key services. Inorder to achive service reliability enhancement of thekey services, we constructed failover clusters in 20082) .
Considering the short life cycle of server hardware,
aging servers should be replaced periodically. In termof the reliability, the replaced system should enhancethe eﬃcient operation of server hardware resources, forexample improvement of CPU utilization. Currently,

Table 1. Comparison of the old redundant system and thenew server system in the main services.
ServiceNFS
PostgreSQLFTPEPICS IOCDNSLDAPEPICS applications

Old methods
Failover cluster

Replaced system
Dual NAS controllers
Failover clustervMotion
Failover clustervMotion
NonevMotion
Primary/Secondary Primary/Secondary,vMotionNonevMotion
DNS round robin
DNS round robin,
vMotionvirtualization technologies, such as KVM, Xen, andVMware are widely used in many scenarios. For theRIBF control system, virtualization software, which
realizes a hardware sharing system, was slected for thefollowing reasons:(1) To reduce operational costs, it is eﬃcient tomake virtualized image ﬁles from current physical servers without modiﬁcations to the system.
(2) Other required services should be constructed bya High-availability (HA) system.
(3) Complex clustering should be avoided in orderto minimize maintenance cost.
(4) Virtualization software with reliable support services are commercially available.
(5) Even if physical servers encountered an issue,
there should be no downtime for the guest operating system.
Therefore, we adopted VMware vSphere 5 as a virtualization software for the RIBF server system, and Network Attached Storage (NAS) manufactured by NetApp as a shared storage with an HA system has been
implemented (See Fig. 1). In this system, the services
for the shared EPICS programs and the virtualized
image ﬁles in VMware environment are provided by
the NAS. To improve service reliability, live-migration,
which moves the guest hosts to other physical servers
without downtime, is provided by VMware vMotion.
For ensuring the scalability and availability of thenetwork, the network between NAS and a network
switch uses the Link Aggregation Control Protocol(LACP). LACP bundles several physical Ethernet
ports in a single logical channel. In fact, EPICS Input/Output Controllers (IOCs), Domain Name System (DNS), Lightweight Directory Access Protocol(LDAP), PostgreSQL, MySQL, Process Variable gateway3) , backup systems, and EPICS application servers
were constructed on the virtualization environment(See Table 1).
The VMware cluster consists of three physicalservers (dual-socket Intel Xeon E5-2630), and 20 virtualized servers have been running on this cluster since
Jan 2014. Replacing an aging system with a virtualization system with HA, it can facilitate eﬃcient useof server resources and operational costs.
References

Fig. 1. System chart of the upgraded virtualization server
system, NAS, and LACP-based network.
∗11) M. Komiyama et al.: Proc. of ICALEPCS07, P.187.
2) A. Uchiyama et al.: APR. 42, (2009) P.145.
3) K. Evans, Jr.: Proc. of ICALEPCS 2005, PO1.033-6.

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