need help setting up a sandbox

[goodcooper]

i want to create a cheap environment for playing with some of the more advanced virtualization features...

i'd like to make 3 boxes

now keep in mind i know little about enterprise level virtualization, but please help me tweak this setup if need be...

the first box would be a storage machine (SAN side) simple dual core CPU, a couple gigs of ram, and a large array, 8x 2TB drives connected to a areca or something, 2 gig nics (maybe this won't be fast enough, please give me some suggestions) i guess this machine would be something that the hypervisor machines below could connect to, like freenas w/ iscsi shares (i don't know!)

xovered to each of the 2 NICs in the above storage machine, i'd like 2 workhorse servers, quad cores, or dual quads, 8,12,16GB ram, whatever meets the requirements (would these have any storage at all?) i guess these would be running some sort of bare metal hypervisor

i would like to experiment with load balancing and failover, would this be a good setup, even for small production needs? what would i need software wise?

say for testing purposes, i'd like these 2 rigs to handle 4 virtual servers, a DC, a support server for various things like serving up a few simple web pages and running things like antivirus updates and driver downloads, a medium to low usage db server for ~20-30 users,
and a storage server for keeping TB or so worth of photos and other miscellany...


i'm sort of trying to bring enterprise level virtualization to small/medium sized businesses, how would i do this?

setting up load balancing would be less important than failover

 

[goodcooper]

might put 3 nics in the storage machine for SAN replication offsite (assume there will be 2 identical setups like these in different locations)

 

[Thuleman]

i'm sort of trying to bring enterprise level virtualization to small/medium sized businesses, how would i do this?

setting up load balancing would be less important than failover

The first thing would imho be to determine need. Do you really need load balancing in a small/medium business environment? Perhaps you do but generally speaking it's probably not that difficult to size a system to meet the need and not worry about the complexity of load balancing.

 

[goodcooper]

ok so assume no load balancing, only failover

 

[dashpuppy]

Sounds like you are in the same situation as me, you want a toy box, personally i bought stuff on ebay, 120$ for 8gigs of ddr3 ram. Intel server board with 6 Sata & raid built on board. Building my toy box for cheap, as I'm on a limited budget.

 

[Vader]

You could build a fairly robust iSCSI storage device with FreeNAS and whatever hardware RAID cards it supports or go with a software solution like starwind's iscsi target software. Then buy a farily beefy server and run VM's off of that, and test failover with the VM's. I do that with Hyper-V, the only thing I really can't test is a Clustered Hyper-V HOST setup, but I have that at work with a real SAN so really don't need it.

 

[outspoken]

i like a 6 NIC minimum on my ESXi machines.

2 for vmotion
2 for storage
2 for management

call me crazy but redundancy is a key factor in my decision.

 

[Child of Wonder]

You could build a fairly robust iSCSI storage device with FreeNAS and whatever hardware RAID cards it supports or go with a software solution like starwind's iscsi target software. Then buy a farily beefy server and run VM's off of that, and test failover with the VM's. I do that with Hyper-V, the only thing I really can't test is a Clustered Hyper-V HOST setup, but I have that at work with a real SAN so really don't need it.

Even software RAID and iSCSI is good enough for a home lab. I'm running a Debian iSCSI target that simply consists of a Sempron 140, 2GB RAM, and 4x 250GB WD RE16 hard drives in software RAID 10. I installed IETD 1.4.20.2 to use as the iSCSI target and it easily handles 6 VMs running on it (2 DCs, vCenter, steaming media server, and more).