So I’m thinking that breaking this up into smaller posts will increase the likelihood of them actually getting written. And as a bonus, should help me remember what the hell I was thinking. So these will probably be computer heavy posts.
Tonights episode is on NFS and why NFS.
NFS is used a lot more in the Linux/UNIX side of things. So why am I mucking about with a Windows server box for it? Active Directory. Not that I will really be using it for this BUT it can! You can setup user mappings for Linux accounts to Windows accounts. Or you can just copy over a users/groups file from the Linux box and map local accounts to it.
I will probably be doing the later. For simplicity sake. The complete end result here would be NFS hosted on a server, shared over Gig Ethernet. Attached to my VMware hosts. And maybe mapped to PC’s or anything I want to have network storage.
Why would you want to do that instead of direct storage? For those without enterprise VMware experience it sounds silly. The way it works is the same storage is available to all of the hosts. So the VM’s can be powered up on any of the hosts. This allows for the load to be spread or for high availability. This probably isn’t hugely needed for my small home/lab setup. But, here is the real kicker, SATA/IDE drivers stuffed into the server are much much much cheaper then 15k SCSI disks. Any other servers I get are going to have SCSI drives that have already have 2+ years of 24/7 wear and tear on them. So I am not expecting a ton of reliability out of them. So I am thinking 2 in a mirror setup and any extras as spares for the system drives on the host servers.
Why bother with ESXi? Beacuse VM’s are awesome! Also, how else am I going to get a dozen or so servers without blowing something up. While I might be able to fake my way through all the AD MCSE tests I probably need to mess with ISA and shit for the rest. Yay learning! Also, VM’s are awesome.
So the short and dirty version.
Cheap and dirty network storage + free VMware enterprise grade hypervisor = good times.
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