Virtual gulker.com on a Mini or two
Posted on August 31, 2006
Filed Under All, Technology, Gulker labs |
Robert Carleton’s story about moving a rack full of older Celeron-based servers to a Mac Mini, using Parallels VM software to host the BSD images of his servers, got me thinking. Robert’s pages, served from a BSD image of his old rack mount servers hosted on a Mac Mini now on his desktop, pop right up: the Mini’s dual 1.66 GHz cores offer performance on a par with his 4 older ~700 MHz Celerons. He notes that there is now a single point of failure, but he’s no longer in the hosting biz, so it’s not a critical issue.
Which got us to thinking about collapsing all of gulker.com’s internal network into our Core Duo Mini. We currently have 6 live computers in the family room (8 processors) on our internal private network (once known as a Class C network), and a bunch of older machines in a rack in the garage. As a learning exercise, we maintain our own internal DNS servers, SAN NAS, print server, mail server and blogging server. The mail server (Linux) and blogging server, Userland Radio on Mac OS X, are now obsolete (Comcast blocks private SMTP servers and Radio is not being developed). So, with a few essential services, and no public-facing servers on the LAN, single-point-of-failure is even less of an issue for us.
For another thing, we don’t have to virtualize a bunch of stuff: our DNS, print and some file servers run on OS X already - we can just move them. I can see leaving the Dual G5 and its fast video card in place as a workstation, the G4 Mini as a secondary workstation (for web browsing, email and the Paperless Project with a backup DNS) and putting Linux and Windows images on the Intel Mini, for times when we need those OSes (the A3 Scanner needs Windows, and Linux is just fun).
Most of the storage on the internal net is now on cheap, big SAN NAS devices, so no issue there. Print sevices can be moved to the SAN NAS, or hosted on a workstation. Road trip in the works, but when I get back, I think everything goes on the Mini. CPU count goes from 8 to 4, and a few hundred pounds of hardware can retire, including our much-loved Cube and AMD 64 box…
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Do you really have a big, cheap storage area network, or was that a typo for “NAS”? If the former, I’d be really interested to learn more details.
Oops… dislexic writing. I think NAS is correct… network attached storage… anyway it’s 2 250 GB drives with ethernet ports that look like SMB or NFS shares…
Yes, that’s “network attached storage”. NAS devices present an interface with file-level semantics over an ethernet data network, so they’re really just specialised file servers. SAN devices operate at a lower level, providing block-level semantics. A storage area network is the replacement of a bus like conventional IDE or SCSI buses with a high-speed dedicated storage network like Fibre Channel.
This sort of thing is usually very expensive, but I imagine that in a decade it won’t be, and all of our computers will have large numbers of processor cores talking to memory and peripheral devices over internal networks. For a moment, I thought I’d missed a step along this road towards cheapness
[…] The gulker.com LAN project is a current free-time priority - new DNS is up (more or less) - and it’s time to begin migrating other services to our 2 Mac Minis (one Intel, one G4). Not sure the DNS forwarding is happening expeditiously, and I’m seeing some weirdness with resolvable domains being forwarded as gulker.com subdomains (which I may need to talk to my ISP about). There is something relaxing about nerd stuff when it’s not part of the job description… […]