Got my new Home Server up and running..

["Ian Lowe" <ianlowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

well, it took a while planning, but I finally implemented my
replacement server for the house.

I had looked at WHS, and decided that I would rather stick with the
full-fat Windows Server 2003 OS, with a twist. I'm a MAPS subscriber,
and wanted to run Exchange Server 2007 - replacing our existing
SBS2003. I wantd to run VMWare, and have 64 bit VMs, so I needed a
pretty capable machine.

I wanted a nice fast processor - our home server has always been a cast-
off desktop machine, and this time I wanted a decently fast machine
rather than just what was last on my desk - so I opted for the Quad
Core Q6600.

In motherboard terms, I wanted something with PCI-X support (all the
good raid cards seem to be PCI-X!) as well as VT support for running
x64 VMs.

I liked the look of ASUS' Professional Workstation range, and chose the
P5WDG2-WS Pro - an absolutely kick-ass board with 7 SATA connectors on
board, PCI-e, PCI-X and able to handle loads of RAM.

I used the multiple drive SATA caddies that let you have 5 drives in 3
bays (and the smaller one that does 3 in 2) for a total of eight drive
bays, with 6 500Gb Samsung Spinpoint drives in it on day one.

4Gb of OCZ RAM (probably the first thing I'll upgrade) finished off the
Spec, along with a silent nvidia Graphics Card (with component video
out - just in case!).

I experimented a bit with various OSes, and decided that for this job I
wanted to use Ubuntu 7.10 - the maturity of the Linux Kernel is just
amazing now, and it can do some pretty funky tricks - as I found out.

I found a little problem with the P5WDG2 - 3 of the SATA controller
ports are tied up to a "FakeRAID" controller, where the bulk of
the
work is done in the drivers - this can't be supported properly under
Linux without a lot of mucking around, and I wanted a nice simple
install.

This left me with 4 500Gb disks on day one, with another two in the
case but uncabled until the new controller arrived (a fairly generic
promise SATA controller).

I built the Ubuntu 7.10 install (using the Alternate 64 bit CD version,
which allows you to conifgure raid devices during install), and
partitioned up my disks with a 20Gb RAID1 mirror set on the first two
disks, and a big 471 Gb per disk RAID5 set - 1.5Tb of useable space,
which I mounted as /home

Once up and running I installed Vmware Server 1.0.4 (free) and created
a set of VMs for the network servers - a Server 2003 R2 64bit domain
controller, and Exchange 2007 Server, a dedicated Gallery appliance and
a Development server for Jen to play with.

So, day one result, Q6600 Quad Core with 4Gb of PC6400 and 1.5Tb of
diskspace, hosting four Virtual Servers at about 4% CPU and using less
than 1.2Gb of real physical RAM.

A few days later, the new SATA controller arrived, so I downed the
server, re-cabled and rebooted - the new disks were partitioned like
the existing ones (adding a linux raid partition on each disk)

Using mdadm (the linux software RAID manager) I then added the two new
disks into the RAID array (they added as spares), then dynamically grew
the raid array from four to six disks ONLINE - the process took about
18 hours as the array was re-shaped... during which Jen and I watched a
movie streaming from the volume *and* 300Gb of data was being copied on
from an external USB drive... awesome.

At the end of the process, I have a 2.2Tb volume with two hot swap bays
still free for future expansion.

So, very cool technologies, big winners are the Quad Core proc
(amazingly quick), vmware server - all this, for free?, Ubuntu 7.10 and
Linux Raid

chuffed!

Ian.