From: Volker Kuhlmann <list0...@paradise.net.nz>
On Wed 30 Aug 2017 19:36:01 NZST +1200, criggie wrote:
Not a problem - it sits there doing little. My current home project
is to build more VMs and replace two elderly servers.
What do you use for VMs?
I use at home what I use at work, which is xenserver.
There are a pair of HP servers which run in hot-cold mode (for power
saving reasons)
I bring the other one up only for patching, and at the end of that all
the VMs are running on the other host.
I know there's no decent frontend system outside a windows binary, which
is annoying but one of the servers had a 2008R2 licence sticker, so I
virtualised that and it works okay.
A lot can be done at the command line too. I've tried but disliked Xen
Orchestra.
In the past I used KVM on my desktop, and that worked fairly well but
having separation is a good thing. It was also possible for the host to
starve VMs of CPU when doing a lot of USB transfers, which was bad when
one of my VMs was the home firewall !
Long term was going to redeploy one of the physical servers as a big NAS with
all the freed up drives as a lower tier storage than the iscsi box.
I'm not a fan of bought NAS boxes. Rolling one's own, what network fs do
you use? Compatibility with certain other OSes is not required (they can
be compatible themselves for a change if they want).
Yeah - I have one HP server running FreeNAS and ZFS as a filesystem. It
works well as backend storage for VMs, but its not a proper redundant
SAN. I'm spoiled at work with some seriously-good gear.
My HP has 8x 1TB drives, and I'm only using ~200 GB of it at the
moment. Power draw is not small, ballparking several hundred watts
continuous. Was looking at a thecus, drobo or synology NAS instead
because they run far lower power.
TBH I could get away perfectly well running my VMs on local storage, but
migration time is much longer.
So storage backend is not redundant, and I only have a single switch so
no redundancy there either.
If I was doing it all over again, I might look at ZFS under linux, or
simply do software raid1 and use NFS or iSCSI to export the storage.
Finally have just bought some Ubiquiti APs - they'll be going in this weekend.
The controller software looks good.
Have heard a few people rave about them, but they can't be configured
without proprietory software. How does that look in practice, and what
foundations does it need to run? Basically, I pay at most $00.00 for
hardware that needs otherOS, and I'm iffy about being required to run
wine etc for critical infrastructure. The argument "but you only need to
run it once when you configure it" is ... lacking.
Concur - but you don't need wine.
The controller software is written in debian / ubuntu and then
ported/repackaged for windows and mac. That makes me comfortable with
this solution.
Without the controller software they run in an autonomous mode but
reconfiguring and Captive Portal auth require the controller to be
running. I had a Cisco WLC for a while and it was very similar, but the
hardware died. Ubiquiti's solution looks great.
My main issue is many of their APs require funny POE. I have proper
802.3af switches, I don't want to use oddball injectors as well.
This list's been fairly quiet lately - what are other people doing in their
networks ?
Played with ARM-based SBCs for small servers, but am unimpressed. They
may have wifi, HDMI, lalala, but not even non-USB Ethernet or a SATA
interface. Even if it's only internal I'd like timely security updates
for as long as I use the hardware. So, bottom line: HW is lacking, SW is
lacking...
Specifically Raspberry Pi or something else?
--
Criggie
http://criggie.org.nz/
_______________________________________________
Linux-users mailing list
Linux-users@lists.canterbury.ac.nz
http://lists.canterbury.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
