Insanity.
Insanity is a RAID 5 between 3 partitions on a single hard drive. Along a similar line, I have created a Virtualbox VM with FreeNAS on it, gave it two extra virtual hard drives and put them in a RAID 1 and shared it to the world via iSCSI, and connected to it via the host machine. I'm sure my hard drive hates me right about now. :)
Virtualbox is nifty and has a nice interface. I'm making a new VM right now to see how well a Linux based PXE boot works. Virtualbox can't PXE boot a Windows image to save it's life. More and more I'm finding that for virtualization software, VMWare or go home. VMWare Player, Server and ESXi. They've got something to fill every need.
Speaking of ESXi, I've got ESXi 4.1 installed on my ultra-sexy HP DL320 G5p. The p stands for pizza box. :) The plan is that this server replaces Guybrush, and Guybrush will become a VM inside of it. I'm going to wait on this, however, because ESXi doesn't like the RAID card in the DL320. I want to see if I can hold out for ESXi 4.2 and see if we get some more hardware love and if my card will be better supported. Right now ESXi completely ignores the RAID controller and sees two individual 500 gig drives. I'm really not sure how it does that, no other OS to my knowledge can ignore a RAID card like that.
Check out this video. Tech show Hak5 hosts build a massive ESXi server for under $2,000. Very very slick.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8QRy_ZLbdQ
Quad core i7 Xeon, shitton of memory and something like 3 terabytes of disk. The disk isn't mentioned in this video, but I caught it in another version of the video which I can't find right now. That version was far more impressive.
Let me explain something about processors and virtual machines. Or hell, processors and software in general. Processors are beefier than you think. I'm rockin' an aged Core 2 duo 1.6ghz in my laptop, and 3 gigs of memory. A couple weekends ago I was having a bit of a geekend with a friend and I was running Ubuntu as the host OS, an active Ubuntu PXE/DHCP/DNS VM, an active Windows 7 VM, and watching movie trailers in 720p on YouTube in the host OS. Not a single hiccup. To say that a quad core i7 Xeon could run a couple of VMs is a serious understatement. :)
(Oh hey, the VM creation finished. Linux PXE lives in Virtualbox.)
I've been designing this ESXi setup in my head for a while now. The conclusion I've been coming to is that beefy servers aren't what you want for an ESXi cluster. If you think about it, an ESXi cluster needs shared storage, so having your ESXi servers, each with their own array of 5 or 6 disks is pointless. They're not going to be used. In fact, with the ease that ESXi can be gotten up and connected to an existing cluster, I would think that installing on a server with two drives in a RAID 1 would be considered beefy.
What you do care about is sufficient processing power, and sufficient memory. Many businesses don't rely on processor intensive applications in the first place. Big, beefy servers tend to go to waste. Really, my DL320 was slated to be an Active Directory server. Really. That's it. Just hosting AD. It's got a Core 2 era quad core Xeon in it. Overkill++. Take the money saved from not buying huge servers with giant arrays of attached storage, and sink it all in to a really nice SAN.
That's my theory anyways. From the way people are talking on Ars, I think lots of people would disagree with me. What do my techie readers think? Inexpensive servers the new black? Or are we forever doomed to giant, all encompassing servers?
Virtualbox is nifty and has a nice interface. I'm making a new VM right now to see how well a Linux based PXE boot works. Virtualbox can't PXE boot a Windows image to save it's life. More and more I'm finding that for virtualization software, VMWare or go home. VMWare Player, Server and ESXi. They've got something to fill every need.
Speaking of ESXi, I've got ESXi 4.1 installed on my ultra-sexy HP DL320 G5p. The p stands for pizza box. :) The plan is that this server replaces Guybrush, and Guybrush will become a VM inside of it. I'm going to wait on this, however, because ESXi doesn't like the RAID card in the DL320. I want to see if I can hold out for ESXi 4.2 and see if we get some more hardware love and if my card will be better supported. Right now ESXi completely ignores the RAID controller and sees two individual 500 gig drives. I'm really not sure how it does that, no other OS to my knowledge can ignore a RAID card like that.
Check out this video. Tech show Hak5 hosts build a massive ESXi server for under $2,000. Very very slick.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8QRy_ZLbdQ
Quad core i7 Xeon, shitton of memory and something like 3 terabytes of disk. The disk isn't mentioned in this video, but I caught it in another version of the video which I can't find right now. That version was far more impressive.
Let me explain something about processors and virtual machines. Or hell, processors and software in general. Processors are beefier than you think. I'm rockin' an aged Core 2 duo 1.6ghz in my laptop, and 3 gigs of memory. A couple weekends ago I was having a bit of a geekend with a friend and I was running Ubuntu as the host OS, an active Ubuntu PXE/DHCP/DNS VM, an active Windows 7 VM, and watching movie trailers in 720p on YouTube in the host OS. Not a single hiccup. To say that a quad core i7 Xeon could run a couple of VMs is a serious understatement. :)
(Oh hey, the VM creation finished. Linux PXE lives in Virtualbox.)
I've been designing this ESXi setup in my head for a while now. The conclusion I've been coming to is that beefy servers aren't what you want for an ESXi cluster. If you think about it, an ESXi cluster needs shared storage, so having your ESXi servers, each with their own array of 5 or 6 disks is pointless. They're not going to be used. In fact, with the ease that ESXi can be gotten up and connected to an existing cluster, I would think that installing on a server with two drives in a RAID 1 would be considered beefy.
What you do care about is sufficient processing power, and sufficient memory. Many businesses don't rely on processor intensive applications in the first place. Big, beefy servers tend to go to waste. Really, my DL320 was slated to be an Active Directory server. Really. That's it. Just hosting AD. It's got a Core 2 era quad core Xeon in it. Overkill++. Take the money saved from not buying huge servers with giant arrays of attached storage, and sink it all in to a really nice SAN.
That's my theory anyways. From the way people are talking on Ars, I think lots of people would disagree with me. What do my techie readers think? Inexpensive servers the new black? Or are we forever doomed to giant, all encompassing servers?