Re: Going Virtual - A Home Server Experience

["Brougham Baker" <bro-yahoo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "Mark McCall" <lists@xxxxxxx>
>> On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 4:01 PM, Martyn Wendon
>> <martynwendon@xxxxxxx>wrote:
>> That's a really timely submission, cheers Mark & Paul!
>>
>> Yesterday I ordered a quad-core server and 8GB of memory to go in
it for
>> a
>> shade over £300 to be the basis for VMWare ESXi, now begins
the process
>> of
>> consolidating and vitalizing what I can!!

>Let us know how it goes Martyn.
>Did you buy a ready built server?

I have started going down this route- I brought the ASUS workstation board
that Ian (I think) had. This has 64 bit PCI so I can move my 3ware card
over. I went with the lower power Q6600 (brand new at the time) 8GB of ram
(>£100 at the time) and an HD3400 series card. It has an old 300GB
drive as
the booter and four Spinpoint F1's in JBOD.in one of those 3x5.25" for
5x3.5" caddies

Basically I have never taken power readings or done anything sensible for
this- I just stuck it together in an old case and started filling the
drives
with ISO's- that is why there is no raid. It's all a bit of a waste really.
I don't know if I am about to replace it. I have a perc 6 sas\sata raid
card
that I am going to stick 8x 1.5TB disks on to get some more space but I
need
to find a case with enough storage.

So while I should have been playing Windows 7 for the beta 71-680 exam
today
I ended up reading lots on Tomshardware et al. First thing is- if your PSU
is even as little as 18 months old replacing it with a newer more efficient
one of the correct rating will most likely pay for itself.

The integrated graphics on the G45 or Nvidia 9400 chipsets are capable of
1080p from Bluray at less than 5% cpu time. I am not sure if this works
with
1080p MKV's though- this I need to know. The Q9550s processors are much
lower power and with the integrated graphics these boxes are idling at 37
watts. The THG boxes are Q9550s on the Intel G45 integrated board with 4Gb
ram and a bluray play with a 500gb 3.5" disk all off of a 200w PSU. I
am not
a gamer- or not on these boxes at least. I'd replace the 3.5" disk
with two
laptop drives in RAID 1. I'd like to be able to get the power down a bit
compared to my current setup- I have so much junk running here my baseline
is 1.2kwh.

This is why I was going to vitalize everything to lower the power It runs
W2k3 64bit and VMWare server 2 running XP with my mail server and a couple
of OpenBSD test servers. The main issue I found with the virtualisation is
that while the core tools are free for just about every platform- none of
them include backup or any sort of portability or failover for free. The
tools that make this a sensible proposition cost thousands. So if I can run
the boxes at 37 watts with huge power why bother with virtualisation.

I am going to play with 2008 and Hyper-V soon- we are already looking at
this for work. Just to see if there is any payback

Bro




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