Servers on a Budget, Linux Software RAID and VMWare Server 2.0
This week I was tasked with putting together a virtualization solution to host a number of desktop-turned-servers whose plastic cases are aging from beige to yellow. As trusty as the little Linux boxes are, when I cringe at the thought of a piece of hardware dying in one of those ancient machines, I know its time to be proactive.
This week I was tasked with putting together a virtualization solution
to host a number of desktop-turned-servers whose plastic cases are
aging from beige to yellow. As trusty as the little Linux boxes are,
when I cringe at the thought of a piece of hardware dying in one of
those ancient machines, I know its time to be proactive.
Servers on a Budget
The economic climate has already tightened up IT budgets so I had to forego an HP server as much as I hated to do so. To quote Ferris Bueller, "It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up." So what did I put together instead? Something not too bad, actually:
The gear arrived this week, I happily assembled the components and fired it up. POST was successful, all hardware was detected and smiling away. One note to anyone new to working with rackmount servers, the fans are loud. If you're not putting them in a server room/closet where the noise won't matter, get tower servers instead.
Linux Software Raid
The SuperMicro board I chose for this solution touts on-board RAID. While nifty in a feature list the on-board RAID is useless under Linux as it is not supported by the kernel. Rather then shell out some $600 for a hardware RAID controller, I opted for Linux Software RAID. There's enough power in this server that the extra overhead for RAID will be barely noticed.
The four SATA hot-swap bays make RAID-5 a perfect candidate. Without giving it too much thought I popped in an Ubuntu 8.04.1 x64 server CD and started my install. I gave each drive a partition for RAID and created a RAID-5 array. Wow, that was easy.
The rest of the base system installed without complaint and finally GRUB tried to install, without success. Hoping for a fluke I retried the GRUB installation numerous times ignoring the fact that trying the same process repeatedly expecting different results is a symptom of insanity. After much pondering and research I determined that a Linux software RAID-5 is either too difficult or impossible to boot from.
In searching around the server room for a spare drive, I considered just throwing in another SATA drive for my OS and then using my RAID-5 as the data partition. The thing I didn't like about that was not having any redundancy for the OS itself. I'd like to avoid the enormous single point of failure. Not finding a drive for my quick fix I let the server be for a day so I could think over my next move.
Redundancy, redundancy... that was my motto for the next couple of days. While briefly considering buying two more disks to set up a RAID-1 array for my OS I realized that Linux's software RAID is ridiculously flexible. I can set up a small 10GB partition and use RAID-1 to mirror that across all four of the drives and still create a RAID-5 with the left over space.
I partitioned out my OS in a RAID-1, created my /vms partition in a RAID-5 and GRUB happily installed onto the mirrored RAID. Upon rebooting everything was happy, my RAIDs synced up.
NOTE: This setup is a clever use of software RAID and while it does provide some flexible redundancy, should one of these drives fail, to realize there are two RAIDs to deal with. Plan your documentation accordingly and practice recovering from failures with this particular configuration.
VMWare Server 2.0
With Ubuntu installed and configured as I wanted it, it was time to download and install VMWare server. I have setup numerous VMWare 1.0.x configurations and was very comfortable with their feature set. I was surprised to see that upon downloading VMWare for this setup, 2.0 had been released. Rather than exciting me this initially annoyed me as I had tested earlier beta versions of 2.0 and was discouraged by the move to their web console from the traditional standalone GUI console applications. In the particular beta I was using, the console seemed to be a hack of VNC and performance was abysmal.
Not wanting to completely write off the new version, I reluctantly downloaded and installed, hoping for the best. The VMWare web access panel seemed to have been polished significantly since my beta experience and was much more responsive and logically laid out. I built a new VM, selected another Ubuntu server ISO to install and fired it up. I then opened the dreaded console and was surprised that it was asking me to install a Firefox plug-in. The plug-in was roughly 18MB so I assumed this was something much better than a simple VNC client. Upon rebooting Firefox and hitting the console again my fears of the old web console disappeared. The new console is excellent. Performance is where I expect it to be over an internet connection and the new portability actually extends the previous generation of VMWare console greatly.
The console will actually show the CPU and memory usage of each host individually and for the entire host as a whole. This is fantastic for seeing if you have one hog VM or if you're getting close to the limit for the host.
I don't have a single complaint about VMWare Server 2.0, in fact I'm now conspiring to upgrade my old 1.0.x installations to make administration easier on myself. My only nitpick is that the new console advertises VMWare Infrastructure although non-intrusively. You can even minimize that pane to ignore the ad completely.
Next Steps
Am I done? Not even close. Next up:
Servers on a Budget
The economic climate has already tightened up IT budgets so I had to forego an HP server as much as I hated to do so. To quote Ferris Bueller, "It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up." So what did I put together instead? Something not too bad, actually:
- Supermicro SYS-6015V-MTB 1U Barebone Server
- Supports two Xeon processors
- Up to 16GB of DDR2-667 memory
- 4x SATA hotswap bays (w/ 2x more internal SATA bays)
- Dual gigabit LAN
- On-board RAID (fakeraid)
- Intel Xeon E5410 Harpertown 2.33GHz Quad-Core Processor
- A-Data 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 667MHz RAM
- 4x 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s drives
The gear arrived this week, I happily assembled the components and fired it up. POST was successful, all hardware was detected and smiling away. One note to anyone new to working with rackmount servers, the fans are loud. If you're not putting them in a server room/closet where the noise won't matter, get tower servers instead.
Linux Software Raid
The SuperMicro board I chose for this solution touts on-board RAID. While nifty in a feature list the on-board RAID is useless under Linux as it is not supported by the kernel. Rather then shell out some $600 for a hardware RAID controller, I opted for Linux Software RAID. There's enough power in this server that the extra overhead for RAID will be barely noticed.
The four SATA hot-swap bays make RAID-5 a perfect candidate. Without giving it too much thought I popped in an Ubuntu 8.04.1 x64 server CD and started my install. I gave each drive a partition for RAID and created a RAID-5 array. Wow, that was easy.
The rest of the base system installed without complaint and finally GRUB tried to install, without success. Hoping for a fluke I retried the GRUB installation numerous times ignoring the fact that trying the same process repeatedly expecting different results is a symptom of insanity. After much pondering and research I determined that a Linux software RAID-5 is either too difficult or impossible to boot from.
In searching around the server room for a spare drive, I considered just throwing in another SATA drive for my OS and then using my RAID-5 as the data partition. The thing I didn't like about that was not having any redundancy for the OS itself. I'd like to avoid the enormous single point of failure. Not finding a drive for my quick fix I let the server be for a day so I could think over my next move.
Redundancy, redundancy... that was my motto for the next couple of days. While briefly considering buying two more disks to set up a RAID-1 array for my OS I realized that Linux's software RAID is ridiculously flexible. I can set up a small 10GB partition and use RAID-1 to mirror that across all four of the drives and still create a RAID-5 with the left over space.
I partitioned out my OS in a RAID-1, created my /vms partition in a RAID-5 and GRUB happily installed onto the mirrored RAID. Upon rebooting everything was happy, my RAIDs synced up.
NOTE: This setup is a clever use of software RAID and while it does provide some flexible redundancy, should one of these drives fail, to realize there are two RAIDs to deal with. Plan your documentation accordingly and practice recovering from failures with this particular configuration.
VMWare Server 2.0
With Ubuntu installed and configured as I wanted it, it was time to download and install VMWare server. I have setup numerous VMWare 1.0.x configurations and was very comfortable with their feature set. I was surprised to see that upon downloading VMWare for this setup, 2.0 had been released. Rather than exciting me this initially annoyed me as I had tested earlier beta versions of 2.0 and was discouraged by the move to their web console from the traditional standalone GUI console applications. In the particular beta I was using, the console seemed to be a hack of VNC and performance was abysmal.
Not wanting to completely write off the new version, I reluctantly downloaded and installed, hoping for the best. The VMWare web access panel seemed to have been polished significantly since my beta experience and was much more responsive and logically laid out. I built a new VM, selected another Ubuntu server ISO to install and fired it up. I then opened the dreaded console and was surprised that it was asking me to install a Firefox plug-in. The plug-in was roughly 18MB so I assumed this was something much better than a simple VNC client. Upon rebooting Firefox and hitting the console again my fears of the old web console disappeared. The new console is excellent. Performance is where I expect it to be over an internet connection and the new portability actually extends the previous generation of VMWare console greatly.
The console will actually show the CPU and memory usage of each host individually and for the entire host as a whole. This is fantastic for seeing if you have one hog VM or if you're getting close to the limit for the host.
I don't have a single complaint about VMWare Server 2.0, in fact I'm now conspiring to upgrade my old 1.0.x installations to make administration easier on myself. My only nitpick is that the new console advertises VMWare Infrastructure although non-intrusively. You can even minimize that pane to ignore the ad completely.
Next Steps
Am I done? Not even close. Next up:
- Converting physical machines to virtual machines
- Monitoring these servers and the RAIDs that support them
- The backup plan
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