A lot of those questions you have raised are usually answered in documentation for the virtual environment you are running.
Let me add a disclaimer that I have ceased supporting organisations that are smaller than 2000 staff. So my head may be in the clouds The issue you have is you limit your redundancy if you run RAID 1, and you will have only 1 TB of space. What VMs are you going to run? If it's a mail server, SQL and fileserver I would hope that the client is small enough to deal grow into 1TB shared disk space within the next 3 years and not out grow it in 12 months. In my personal experience I have not seen a small business use less than 1 TB for files, this was back in 2004-2005 How do you intend support the clustered environment? Granted I have not played with Xen virtualisation but I would believe that similar rules apply in VMWare or Microsoft and Citrix. I am making assumptions here: If you are employing HA clustering My question is how will share disks out across nodes work when your VM reside on node1's disk and for some stupid reason node1 is dead how will node2 access the VMs? I wouldn't worry too much about striping v's mirroring until you consider what type of cluster you are going to design. To have real HA you might need to reconsider the idea of supporting any local disks as you will not have real HA in your design until the disks are external to both cluster nodes. This is big money but you get what you pay for. for a small home/office for my personal use I have purchased a DRoboPro FS fully populated with 2 TB drives with a total capacity of 10TB storage for $6,000 the system is self healing, you can intermix drive sizes and you use cheap SATA drives, I use it as my test environment which I run VMs through vSphere, and I have True HA until I lose my disk subsystem. Support the distro you are comfortable with otherwise you may come across issues that you may struggle with due to location of config files and the like.. really you need to analyse your design and think about the environment you are going to support, the HA you are expecting and the applications you will be supporting in these VMs. Just may be you are going to complex without understanding the technologies that you might be employing. Mind map your idea draw up your topology and identify single points of failure. If you think those single points of failure are acceptable and you are willing to let your client sit idly for 3 hours waiting for Dell to supply a replacement part, then ask your client is that acceptable? How are you going to over come theses? > I'm setting up some new hardware for a client of mine. > Basically 2 new dell Dell PowerEdge R210 IIs > (http://www.dell.com/au/business/p/poweredge-r210-2/pd) nice and small and > they seem quiet enough for an office (unlike the original R210) > > Anyway, quad core xeon, 2x 1Tb 7200RPM drives, 8gb ram (~$1500 each btw). > The machines will be used as VM hosts (kvm) for a handfull of guests, > file/domain server (ebox), PBX (piaf), mail server web server, "magic windows > only application" server etc. As the guests run everything in the ofice some > kind of HA is needed. > > I'm thinking ganeti is the way to manage it all as it takes care of DRBD and > failover giving me a nice HAish setup without too much work. > > The questions > How should I setup my disks? > I'm tossing up between, (all the below assume a small raid 1 partition for /, > this is for the storage pool) > RAID 1 with mdadm giving me 1 disk read speed but the ability to read 2 > streams. > RAID 1 with mdadm and fancyness giving me 2x read speed for a single stream, > but normal behaviour for multiple streams and 1x write. > RAID 0 with mdadm 2x read, 2x write and trust DRBD to look after my data ;-> > no RAID, set up as 2 separate drives use DRBD to look after data and get > "more spindles" into the mix (so say file server lives on one disk and mail > server on another) > > What deb based distro should I use for my host(or present a *really* > compelling argument for something else)? > I would use ubuntu as i'm most familiar with it but the recent debacle with > unity has really hurt my confidence with them. > Should i go to debian and if so which version? > > Networking > each server has 2 gbit ports on it. > should I > team the nics, then run a vlan for drbd and another for regular coms > dedicated nic for drbd and one for general coms. > > Any other suggestions or gotchas to look out for? > > I have my own answers to these questions, but I'd really like to hear any > advice from the crowd (its like "the cloud" but open source and P2P ;->) > -- > SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ > Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html > -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
