BadassBob
Digitally rendered
First, a brief background. While in my laundry room last night, I heard that familiar clickity-clack of a failing hard drive coming from my server. Made a dash for the workstation, SSHed in, ran smartctl on my drives, and found a pair of my 500GB WD Blacks will soon be giving up the ghost. They have served me well for 6 years in a RAID 10 mdadm configuration hosting my mess of virtual machines 24/7...now I have an excuse to upgrade. Last night, I backed up all of my virtual machines, so no worries until the new stuff arrives. I slept a little better last night.
I decided to replace the 500GB Blacks with 2TB Reds, and will run the VMs from a 2x 1TB WD Red 2.5" RAID 1 configuration. I ended up purchasing a 2x 2.5" hot-swap bay for my case as well, along with 32GB of RAM (upping it from 16GB) and another 3Ware RAID card. This got me thinking, maybe I will go with another OS this time instead of CentOS, thinking a distro specific for virtualization such as Proxmox or Ovirt, as they provide intuitive web GUIs for VM management, storage pool management, and system monitoring. Previously, I did everything the old fashioned way, over SSH and ran tools from the command line...time for me to get a little more modern in that regard.
Aside from the RAM upgrade and additional 3ware card, I'm still keeping my base hardware which consists of a pair of 2.5GHz Xeon L5420 CPUs on a Supermicro X7DWE mainboard. Even though they're long in the tooth (from 2008), they work very well for what I do, but that stuff will also be upgraded late this year or early next year with a newer single or dual Xeon mainboard, as they're much more power efficient than my dinosaurs.
The final setup will look like this:
4x 2TB WD Red
4x 2TB Hitachi Ultrastar
2x 1TB WD Red 2.5" for VMs
1x IBM BR10i SAS/SATA host bus adapter
1x 3ware 9650SE-4PLPML SATA RAID controller
Supermicro X7DWE Mainboard
2x Xeon L5420 CPU
4x 8GB Hynix DDR2 667 FB-DIMM
The virtual machine pool:
MythTV master back end - network PVR system
MythTV slave back end - failover for the master back end
Vortexbox - music server
CentOS - Amanda network backup for bare metal backups and snapshots of network clients
CentOS - ownCloud to access all of my media from any internet connected device
CentOS - Piwigo for photo hosting
Debian - Transmission Daemon bit torrent server
CentOS - Squid Proxy and DansGuardian for keeping pesky ads and malware away from my network
OpenMediaVault - file storage
As it currently stands, my server has been running 24/7 for the last 6 years across 2 base hardware upgrades (went from a Core2 Quad/4GB RAM to dual Xeon/16GB RAM) with no reinstallation of the OS and just updating the virtual machines to newer OSes as they approach their EOL. Aside from initial configuration, it has been a mostly hands-off experience, but with Proxmox or Ovirt, it will be even easier. Stay tuned!
I decided to replace the 500GB Blacks with 2TB Reds, and will run the VMs from a 2x 1TB WD Red 2.5" RAID 1 configuration. I ended up purchasing a 2x 2.5" hot-swap bay for my case as well, along with 32GB of RAM (upping it from 16GB) and another 3Ware RAID card. This got me thinking, maybe I will go with another OS this time instead of CentOS, thinking a distro specific for virtualization such as Proxmox or Ovirt, as they provide intuitive web GUIs for VM management, storage pool management, and system monitoring. Previously, I did everything the old fashioned way, over SSH and ran tools from the command line...time for me to get a little more modern in that regard.
Aside from the RAM upgrade and additional 3ware card, I'm still keeping my base hardware which consists of a pair of 2.5GHz Xeon L5420 CPUs on a Supermicro X7DWE mainboard. Even though they're long in the tooth (from 2008), they work very well for what I do, but that stuff will also be upgraded late this year or early next year with a newer single or dual Xeon mainboard, as they're much more power efficient than my dinosaurs.
The final setup will look like this:
4x 2TB WD Red
4x 2TB Hitachi Ultrastar
2x 1TB WD Red 2.5" for VMs
1x IBM BR10i SAS/SATA host bus adapter
1x 3ware 9650SE-4PLPML SATA RAID controller
Supermicro X7DWE Mainboard
2x Xeon L5420 CPU
4x 8GB Hynix DDR2 667 FB-DIMM
The virtual machine pool:
MythTV master back end - network PVR system
MythTV slave back end - failover for the master back end
Vortexbox - music server
CentOS - Amanda network backup for bare metal backups and snapshots of network clients
CentOS - ownCloud to access all of my media from any internet connected device
CentOS - Piwigo for photo hosting
Debian - Transmission Daemon bit torrent server
CentOS - Squid Proxy and DansGuardian for keeping pesky ads and malware away from my network
OpenMediaVault - file storage
As it currently stands, my server has been running 24/7 for the last 6 years across 2 base hardware upgrades (went from a Core2 Quad/4GB RAM to dual Xeon/16GB RAM) with no reinstallation of the OS and just updating the virtual machines to newer OSes as they approach their EOL. Aside from initial configuration, it has been a mostly hands-off experience, but with Proxmox or Ovirt, it will be even easier. Stay tuned!