Otaking 2.0
From otaking wiki
Contents |
Plans for otaking 2.0
Hardware
New hardware will utilize most of my old gaming rig.
Pre-existing hardware
Case: Chieftec Dragon miditower with the insides covered with vibration and sound dampening sheets
Case fans: 5x Arctic Cooling 8cm fans running at 7 V (2 front, 2 rear, 1 psu)
CPU fan: Zalman 7000Cu
Motherboard: MSI Neo-FIS2R K8T800
CPU: AMD Athlon64 3000+ (2.0 GHz)
RAM: 2 GB
Graphics card: nVidia Geforce 6600GT (may be replaced by an ATI Rage Pro since no graphics performance is required)
Planned purchases
2x 160-320 GB SATA HDDs; For use as system disks in a RAID 1 array.
Fan controller for 3.5" drive bay to replace current 5.25" fan controller.
Drive bay, 4 in 3 (four 3.5" internal bays in three 5.25" external slots, maybe the Cooler Master 4 in 3 module at komplett.se). Hopefully this drive bay doesn't carry the vibrations too much to the chassi. I've grown to enjoy the silence achieved by not having hard drives directly in contact with the steel. Those vibrations can be really annoying.
Software
Host OS: CentOS 5 (based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux)
VMware Server for Linux
Concept
Minimal host OS running multiple guest OSes with VMware Server.
Virtual Machines
A short list of possible configurations of virtual machines. Each VM has some overhead in terms of RAM usage which limits the number of VMs I can run at one time. Possible overhead (up to 54 MB for a VM allocated up to 512 MB RAM) is not included in resource proposal. I think up to 1700-1800 MB RAM can be directly allocated, leaving 200-300 MB RAM for overhead and host OS.
| Description | Guest OS | Service(s) | Resource proposal | Main storage | Comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VM 1 | Firewall/
port forward | FreeBSD | ipfw with dummynets(?) | ~64-192 MB RAM | Configuration saved within VMfs | |
| VM 2 | DB server | FreeBSD | MySQL 5.x | ~192-256 MB RAM | DB saved within VMware virtual disk | Current database size ~100 MB |
| VM 3 | NAS | FreeBSD | FreeNAS(?) | ~128 MB RAM(?) | Files saved within VMware virtual disk
and/or raw mounted disks(?) | |
| VM 4 | HTTP server | FreeBSD | Apache 2.x | ~256 MB RAM | Files accessed via NAS(?) | |
| VM 5 | Mail server | FreeBSD | Courier-IMAP and Postfix
with SpamAssassin | ~128-256 MB RAM | Mailboxes accessed via NAS or local(?) | |
| VM 6 | FTP server | FreeBSD | PureFTPd(?) | ~128-256 MB RAM | Files accessed via NAS(?) | |
| Summary | ~896-1344 MB RAM
/ 2048 MB |
Additional services
Some form of user database connection with mail, FTP and NAS. Candidates: LDAP?
Separate database within HTTP server for its use only?
Possible mergers
Only use FTP from FreeNAS, skip standalone FTP server?
Intigrate user database/authentication into DB VM?
Mail server with firewall?
Storage
Different ways to manage VM/data storage. The easiest way to share access to data is to utilize the NAS server
One idea is to store the information in the same VMware virtual disk as the guest OS. This could work well enough when the required storage space is low.
A better idea is to store the data in a separate VMware virtual disk from the guest OS for easy backup. In the case of large storage requirements, like for the NAS server, this is a much better idea than the previous since it separates the OS from the data.
A third idea, mainly for the NAS server's more permanent storage of larger files, is to mount one or more partitions/devices raw. You wouldn't need to have data stored in VMware virtual disk files on such drives, which increases portability and access from outside of the VM if necessary.
VMware discussion forum
My recently posted topic: VM and data storage (comments on my planned server upgrade is appreciated)
Interesting topics
Physical Disk Multiple VMservers
VMDK Performance tweaks....how to obtain the best performance???
