[TriLUG] TriLUG Server Refresh

Thu Apr 30 13:22:29 EDT 2015

On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 1:00 PM, Bill Farrow via TriLUG
<trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
> TriLUG has acquired a new rackmount server from ncsu-lug. The Steering
> Committee (SC) intends to replace our existing server, Pilot, by
> moving it into a VM running on this new hardware. The plan is to
> purchase new hard drives, install a small host OS, and bring up a kvm
> guest of "pilot". We could use some help and advice:
>
> * How many disks should we buy ?

      Correct me if I am wrong but it is a 2U with 6 drive bays.
Personally I would get at least 4 drives: 2 small ones (SSD?) for the
OS and 2-4 large ones for the VMs (raid 1 or 5). For the large drives,
how much are 2TB nowadays?

> * How should the disks be managed (lvm, raid, etc) ?

      Since lvm now can do raid, I would suggest that.

> * What host OS ? (Pilot is Ubuntu 12.04 LTS)

      It depends on how you want to deploy. Personally I want to do as
lightweight vm host os as possible, so something like alpine linux
would be a starting point. That said, it would make sense it to be
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS because of what people are comfortable with.

For which vm thingie to run, I personally have run esxi, kvm/qemu,
vbox, and xen. I can help with any of those but I only have packer
scripts (to spool up vms) for esxi and kvm. I would also later suggest
to run docker/juju but having that server to be a vm.

> * How do we manage the host and VMs if we only have 1 public ipv4 address ?
>
      That is a router issue: ports (PAT?). But you will need to do
that anyway depending on which other services you will provide. But,
we can have some weird port to ssh into the host... using of course
"password" as the password.
>
> Current Server:
>   Supermicro X6DH8-XB, 2x Intel Xeon Dual-Core 3.2GHz, 2GB RAM
>   3ware 9000 Storage Controller
>   8x WDC WD2500SD-01KCC0 Hard Drives
>   1x FUJITSU MHT2040BH
>
> New Server:
>   Dell PowerEdge 2950, 2x Intel Xeon X5450 3.0GHz, 32GB RAM
>   8x empty drive slots for 2.5" SATA HDD
>   http://trilug.org/~bgerard/moya.specs.tgz
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