Virtualization Followup
A few weeks ago I wrote about my possible plans to change the setup of my home network to move many, if not all, of the services I provide to my home network off of my physical server and onto a virtual machine, with a promise to follow up on how that worked out. As it turns out, I still have a lot to learn about virtualization before I start running production virtual machines at home.
The problems started when I tried installing the Vmware-tools package on my freshly-installed Ubuntu 8.10 virtual machine. Installation of the tools package wiped out networking on the vm, and there was no way I could figure out to get it back. No bother, I've run virtual machines without the vmware-tools package installed before. This just meant that the machine won't have the really fast networking or special shared folders with the host options.
I pushed ahead with setting up the NFS share on the host machine and connecting to it from the virtual machine, only to find out that the couple hundred gigabytes of data I had stored had ownership and permissions issues, and the only way I could figure out to solve them was to create all the users that existed on the vm on the host as well. That in itself negated one of the benefits of having the virtual machine host the web server and samba shares, since I'd have to set that up on any vmware host I built to run the virtual machine on. Even after creating duplicates of all the virtual machine's users on the host, I still was unable to create or modify files on the NFS share from the virtual machine, even though the share was read/write. I was, however, able to connect from my laptop over Samba (windows shared folders) and perform all those operations that way. I still haven't figured that one out. So, I pulled out my portable hard drive, filled it up off the physical server, then transfered the files back to the virtual server (and onto the NFS share) from Windows on my laptop. A tedious process, but it worked. But with being unable to modify files from the virtual machine, I still was forced to log into the physical server quite a bit to perform maintenance tasks.
I eventually decided to abandon the NFS share and create a very large virtual disk so I could move all the files to the virtual machine and use the vmware host as nothing more than a home for the virtual machines I decided to run. This is where my paranoid backup strategy became very useful. I ran a quick backup of my data drive and then erased that drive and moved my virtual machine to the now empty drive. I then created the large virtual disk, choosing the option to divide the file into 2GB files, which would make it much faster to back up (a few 2GB files instead of 1 300GB file each time I ran backups) and fired up the vm. I got the new disk all configured, then set the backup drive to be shared to the virtual machine.
I was able to rsync the files over to the virtual machine, and I thought everything was going to be fine, until it inexplicably shut off a couple days after the migration, and refused to start via either the console gui or the command-line tools. Fortunately I hadn't been running the virtual machine long enough to modify any of the files being shared out over the network, so the backup drive still contained the latest versions of everything when I decided to abandon the virtual machine. I deleted the new virtual disk and began the tedious process of installing all the software I'd need to run all the network services I need on my physical server. I was able to get the virtual machine up and running once after rebooting the server, but once I powered it off it won't start again. I'm sure if I really needed any more files off of it a reboot of the host machine would allow me to start it up again, but I don't think there are any files left on it that I need.
I'm sure one of these days I'll be able to try this experiment again and have it work out a whole lot better than it did this time, but as for now I think I'm going to keep things simple and just run everything from one physical server. It'll just be a pain in the butt if it goes down and I have to rebuild the server. At least my data will be safe, though, and that's the most important part.
The problems started when I tried installing the Vmware-tools package on my freshly-installed Ubuntu 8.10 virtual machine. Installation of the tools package wiped out networking on the vm, and there was no way I could figure out to get it back. No bother, I've run virtual machines without the vmware-tools package installed before. This just meant that the machine won't have the really fast networking or special shared folders with the host options.
I pushed ahead with setting up the NFS share on the host machine and connecting to it from the virtual machine, only to find out that the couple hundred gigabytes of data I had stored had ownership and permissions issues, and the only way I could figure out to solve them was to create all the users that existed on the vm on the host as well. That in itself negated one of the benefits of having the virtual machine host the web server and samba shares, since I'd have to set that up on any vmware host I built to run the virtual machine on. Even after creating duplicates of all the virtual machine's users on the host, I still was unable to create or modify files on the NFS share from the virtual machine, even though the share was read/write. I was, however, able to connect from my laptop over Samba (windows shared folders) and perform all those operations that way. I still haven't figured that one out. So, I pulled out my portable hard drive, filled it up off the physical server, then transfered the files back to the virtual server (and onto the NFS share) from Windows on my laptop. A tedious process, but it worked. But with being unable to modify files from the virtual machine, I still was forced to log into the physical server quite a bit to perform maintenance tasks.
I eventually decided to abandon the NFS share and create a very large virtual disk so I could move all the files to the virtual machine and use the vmware host as nothing more than a home for the virtual machines I decided to run. This is where my paranoid backup strategy became very useful. I ran a quick backup of my data drive and then erased that drive and moved my virtual machine to the now empty drive. I then created the large virtual disk, choosing the option to divide the file into 2GB files, which would make it much faster to back up (a few 2GB files instead of 1 300GB file each time I ran backups) and fired up the vm. I got the new disk all configured, then set the backup drive to be shared to the virtual machine.
I was able to rsync the files over to the virtual machine, and I thought everything was going to be fine, until it inexplicably shut off a couple days after the migration, and refused to start via either the console gui or the command-line tools. Fortunately I hadn't been running the virtual machine long enough to modify any of the files being shared out over the network, so the backup drive still contained the latest versions of everything when I decided to abandon the virtual machine. I deleted the new virtual disk and began the tedious process of installing all the software I'd need to run all the network services I need on my physical server. I was able to get the virtual machine up and running once after rebooting the server, but once I powered it off it won't start again. I'm sure if I really needed any more files off of it a reboot of the host machine would allow me to start it up again, but I don't think there are any files left on it that I need.
I'm sure one of these days I'll be able to try this experiment again and have it work out a whole lot better than it did this time, but as for now I think I'm going to keep things simple and just run everything from one physical server. It'll just be a pain in the butt if it goes down and I have to rebuild the server. At least my data will be safe, though, and that's the most important part.