Not so very long ago I wrote about the perfect machine. New moves in the virtualized world have change my view, and thus the upcoming new machine.
In the very old days, a network lived next to a separate telephone network and a separated storage network. Then, voice turned into VOIP, and storage turned into an iSCSI or FCOE network, all converged into a single infrastructure. This moved along with the virtualization of servers through smartos, kvm or the vmwares of this world.
Nowadays, escpecially with the upcoming vSphere5.1, physical servers are equipped with their own storage, which is shared along with the other physical servers.
So why would I not do the same?
Secondly, although a small-footprint server would be convenient, it has to be paid from my budget – which is not suited for such nice-to-have experiments.
This morning I went to the local hardware shop, to select a system. One with sufficient horsepower to really start a virtualized environment; not one virtualboxed. Instead of just buying one of their productline, I found one of the salesguys to be properly fitted with sufficient knowledge to help me.
In due course, we selected a kitlist of best-for-fit equipment, which will be build and tested the upcoming few days. Due to my schedule, I cannot take the machine from the sho any sooner. And that will give them proper time to do their best to assemble and test it.
So what’s in there? I5-3550, 32Gb memory and 2 times 3Tb sata-3 harddisks. Plenty of space left to extend, if needed. I don’t need to game, so the standard HD3000 will do nicely.
Yes. I’m happy. Picture will follow when the machine is here.
Then, KVM setup, build of the server to house the contents of the current one, and then time to construct the auto-deploy. Time to test Nagios-XL, as promised.