Well Xen anyway!!…..One for the System Admins or anybody else who has overall responsibility for the systems at a workplace/school.
I love it when a plan comes together!!!. A few months ago Arron from Totali convinced me to throw caution to the wind and virtualise a number of our servers into one ‘box’. Lots has been said re the advantages of doing this
- Limiting your power usage and therefore carbon footprint
- Less ‘black boxes’ to replace
- Lower overall cost of ownership etc
But for me the big advantage was the idea that I could ‘export’ each machine and import them onto another in case of hardware failure (We have kept many of our services on Mac servers as this can be done easily with them). I was not convinced this would work!!!
So on Friday I bought a cheap ‘box’ with the following specifications for a cost of well less than $1000NZ with the following specs:
Intel® Core 2 Duo 3.16GHz 6MB Cache 1333MHz FSB 45nm #E8500
Asus P5KPL-CM Mainboard
2 x A-Data 2GB DDR-2 800 Memory totalling 4GB’s
Seagate 160GB Barracuda 7200.9 SATAII NCQ
Asus DRW-2014 DVD Writer
It took less than 15mins to load Xen server by Citrix and install a working copy of our Active Directory from an image…..Pure magic….especially as presently we are running the free version on XenServer only. This is the sorts of things that makes me as System Admin with a Technical staff of 1 and 400+ machines to maintain, sleep a lot more soundly.
A truly Zen Like moment!
Very inspiring. I’ll have to look into this. Thanks.
A little message from the guy that convinced him to try it
I did this process when I had to reinstall a client’s Xen Server with 3 VM’s on it, because they needed to add more storage in a different configuration. I downloaded the images to a network share, configured the RAID, and reinstalled Xen Server. I copied the images back on, tweaked their IP/MAC addresses to where they should be (it’s a good idea to note the MAC address because they change when you re-import - more important for Linux because of how it assigns interfaces), and hey presto server done
Couldn’t have been simpler! I did take a while to copy the images over the network though, but that’s for another day.