Project: Rackmount Overkill

Total combined storage for all my systems.

im embarking on project rackmount underkill i seen that rack mount storage array in the classies and i was like :O they make those?! awesome! so that shal be the path i go down now lol. not to mention i finally found myself a rack im going to pickup sat. and i know a certain some one that has a hell of a deal on a norco 260 and i know some one who wants to buy it and finally has fundage

this shal be a long and expensive journey but my network storage that i have now (a whopping 850gb) is almost full and running out of space quickly. which is weird i never even used 100gb till like this year. your a bad influence thideras

Hey now, that isn't my fa---

Ok it probably is.

You make us dream thid.... because of your glorious rack I'm going to try and build my own mini rack to plop my server and store other items.

Thideras: Creator of dreams.

Pvt.Dancer said:

Thideras: Creator God of dreams.

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there fixed your typo

wagex said:

Pvt.Dancer said:

Thideras: Creator God of dreams and rackmounts.

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there fixed your typo

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There, fixed your typo.

AHAHAHAHA! You guys are crackin me up!

I was pretty busy the past few weeks due to work and school, but I've had some free time to screw around with my servers. I jumped on MSDN and grabbed 2012 Server, 2013 Exchange, 2013 SharePoint, and Visual Studio. After a bit of a struggle with 2012 Server, I finally did get it installed and somewhat functional. The only problem I have left is if the server wants to restart, it hard locks the virtual machine. If I "reset" (same as pushing the restart button on a real computer), it gets stuck at the boot screen forever. The only way for it to work is to do a full power down of the virtual machine. Then it comes up perfectly happy and never has an issue.

Installing took quite some time.



"Working on it. This shouldn't take long*.".



Only took 30 minutes or so, but it finished.



With my limited time, this seems substantially better than whatever version I supported at SDSU.



I gave it 4 cores and 8gb of RAM. Maybe that wasn't enough. I'm going to power it down and double both. In the future, I'll probably have to allocate more RAM than that. I intend to add more to this.



*Compared to the age of the Earth.

Oh god I made it worse. Seriously SharePoint, what are you indexing? The website is blank. Stop being a jerk.

This is 8 cores (half the host server) and 16gb of RAM. All I did was log in.

I honestly hate share point lol. But have you tried MSconfig diagnostic mode to see if that makes any difference in your rebooting? maybe you can narrow it down to a specific process.

Pvt.Dancer said:

I honestly hate share point lol. But have you tried MSconfig diagnostic mode to see if that makes any difference in your rebooting? maybe you can narrow it down to a specific process.

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Windows had some more updates to do, so I let it do a restart and it worked that time. That is the first time it has ever restarted, including the initial install that hard locked during each reboot phase. I think my VirtualBox is just too old for 2012 to work properly.

Ive been playing around with SharePoint server 2010 and been working through a book to learn about it...
Got to chapter 7 in the book then got stuck because the feature the book refers to is only available in the enterprise version. (i.e. Business Data Web Parts)

You could always skip that section of the book.

SharePoint seems to have chilled out. Bouncing between 13-30% CPU usage with an affinity towards the former. Even with that low of usage, my host is reporting 350% CPU usage (3.5 cores, it isn't reporting wrong). There are periodic checks and updates that SharePoint does every few minutes to make sure everything is running correctly and I'm going to increase the time between them if it keeps up this high processor usage.

thideras said:

Windows had some more updates to do, so I let it do a restart and it worked that time. That is the first time it has ever restarted, including the initial install that hard locked during each reboot phase. I think my VirtualBox is just too old for 2012 to work properly.

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Look at VM Server, it is EOL because Symantec wants money but it works with rare complaints.

I can't really switch my VM host without a huge headache. It also has to work perfectly with CentOS 6.x (and future revisions) and I'd prefer if it had a web interface. That just doesn't seem like a good decision, but I appreciate the input.

thideras said:

I can't really switch my VM host without a huge headache. It also has to work perfectly with CentOS 6.x (and future revisions) and I'd prefer if it had a web interface. That just doesn't seem like a good decision, but I appreciate the input.

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Provided you could and there was no problems, would you consider moving to a hard hypervisor like ESXi?

I've considered moving to a baremetal hypervisor, yes. I think I'd have a few issues, though.

Disks passing through to the virtual machines is the biggest one. I wouldn't have an issue with that now because I'm using a real RAID controller, but I was considering ZFS and that completely removes that option (short of running it on a single volume, which I might as well run EXT4). This isn't a deal breaker, but it kinda sucks.

The next issue may be a non-issue. When I looked, I thought that the viewer portion of ESXi required a Windows client to manager it. I use Linux as my desktop operating system, so that is difficult to work around. I'd rather not run a virtual machine on my system to manage virtual machines on the server. That is unnecessarily complex. If there is a Linux variant, that solves this issue. I'll look into it after I type up this post.

Another major issue is related to the RAID card. I haven't found how to manage the RAID card remotely. Right now, I can fire up software to do anything on the RAID controller. With a baremetal hypervisor though, I lose that layer and can't manage it short of being right at the terminal. This isn't a huge issue, but it is very convenient to not have to stand in front of the rack or restart the server to manage disks/arrays.

Licensing is my last concern. I want to stick with a Hypervisor that is going to be around for awhile. While I don't mind reinstalling my virtual machines, it really is a pain in the *** to make sure everything is setup right.

Regardless, I'm certainly open to suggestions and I'm willing to test it out on one of the IBM servers. With as much data as I have, I can't afford to get half way through a conversion and go "oh crap this doesn't work".

EDIT: I have access to Hyper-V on MSDN. Might check that out for fun, if nothing else. Double EDIT: Maybe not, this is really limited.

Thideras, once I'm done travelling with work and move into a new house, I plan on checking out Proxmox as a hypervisor. I'm not sure if you have looked into it or not, but it is another solution.

According to their website, that simply uses KVM for the hypervisor. I've used that in the past and I didn't care for it.