Why didn’t anyone tell me…

So I work for this place called VMware that takes the idea of consolidating servers into a single monolithic megaserver that should (and nearly always does) save you money and increase data travel speeds and so on. I’m looking at the house and I was able to count 7 computers, 4 of which are user-centric and 3 of which (maybe 4) are data-centric, meaning to me that I could really turn 4 of them off in exchange for running one far more powerful one. And throw into the mix that I already use 3 VMs that I would rather not run on my laptop. So in a small, cheap way, I am a potential target for such consolidation already. But I don’t run megasuper servers with fiberchannel cards to mega-racked storage arrays. I run a pair of slowish RAID units, an old busted down windows box, a newer mac mini, an older mac mini, a pair of apple laptops, a PS3, and a Linksys firewall/wifi device. Looking into the pile I figure there’s some electricity and storage to be consolidated and a lot of upgrading to do. So what would it take.

• First I had to identify what actually needs to get done on the network.
• Second I had to identify how much space that is, and how and where to store it.
• Third I had to identify how much to get that kind of performance.
• Fourth I had to identify how to sell a kidney. Because that’s how much it would take. But, seeing as I’m rather attached to mine, I think I’ll just look for a less expensive way.

So let’s look.

1: What gets done and where will it go.

Central Server: I’m going to skip a long discussion of why and tell you now that I want  to run OS X Server on my home network to do a number of jobs. We can put why in another article. It will handle the backups properly, the file sharing properly, the calendar serving properly, etc. I like what it does and how it does it. I’m not going back into serving email with it this round, but it’s nice to know it can. This can be virtualized, but only on Apple host hardware. I can live with that. It will hold offline photos, backups, media server for sharing to the PS3, and well anything else I can think of that can just be piled into one server.

Satellite VMs: I also run Quicken in a VM. And I have to download Audiobooks from the public library in Windows. And so help me I want a web proxy. And so long as we’re on it, I’d like to have a VM that does most of the work the Linksys box does. Possible, but not probable.

Backup server: currently on a ReadyNAS box, but getting hard to administer.

Cold storage server: For keeping uncompressed ISO images of movies, lossless compressed audio of CDs, audiobook builder project files, iMovie project files, etc. that should be kept, but maybe not online. This is currently done by cold-swapping in older hard drives via USB and leaving them in the desk, off.

Then the user-only boxes I don’t plan to make virtual currently:

Desktop mac mini: My scanner/iTunes/movie sync station.

Gaming PC: I don’t have one any more, because mine is so out of date, but I want one. I’ll put it in the list.

Wife laptop: Photo editing, daily tasks, etc.

My laptop: Photo editing, daily tasks, etc.

Kid browser box: web games, run Indigo (to turn on/off lights in the house).

2: How much space do I really need in the coming year?

Doing all the math on a sheet of real dead-tree paper (with blue lines no less!) I worked out that I need about 16 TB total for all that, online all at once:

7 online data – VMs, media, photos.

4 backups

4 cold storage space

2 growing space to prevent having to rebuild next year.

3: How?

In order to get all that storage in one server, I’ll want something quite serious. But I can’t afford quite serious. Which leads to a problem. How fast is fast enough? My current network is gigabit, but the transfer rate to the low-power out-of-date RAID units I have caps out at 5 meg a second. Hardly fast enough for the kind of things I plan to make them do. In fact a serious factor in doing this all in the first place is that the two units I have keep bogging down doing things like playing a movie while deleting files or well, anything else, at the same time. So they’re essentially serial RAID units, you can only use them from one location at a time. And that won’t fly.

So the problems to solve are now boiled down a bit to this:

I want a powerful server to run VMs.

It will need about 8 GB of RAM and a super-fast 12-16TB RAID shared over the network.

I want to run MacOS X Server, preferably as a VM.

I want to be able to share lots and lots of data from a hopefully centralized point.

I want to use less power and rack mount this mess in the garage, out of reach of little fingers.

I want to be able to grow the storage with a minimum of fuss, and incrementally.

4: Can it be done in a house?

The simple solution would be to buy an Intel based XServe with a fiberchannel card and XRaid, install them in the rack (sideways, so I can still fit the car in), run the VMs in Fusion and call it a day. But the price puts that idea out of reach.

Price ballpark: Over 5 kilobucks.

The next notch down is to get a Mac Pro with a 3ware 9690 card plus gobs of RAM, run regular OS X on it, Fusion in the middle, OS X Server in a VM, other VMs on Fusion.

Price ballpark: Over 3 kilobucks.

The next notch down after that is to decouple the mac jobs from the non-mac jobs, so keep the mini and the McServer VM together, but move all the other VMs to a beefy-ish ESXi server and slowly learn to do each of those other tasks on the ESXi server, and eventually write off OS X Server. But as the idea was to consolidate instead of fragmenting more, this is counterproductive at the moment.

Price ballpark: 1.5 kilobucks.

The least attractive option (from a consolidation view) is to just rebuild the ReadyNAS units I have with bigger drives and continue to live with the slower transfers, put bigger drives in all the user boxes and only transfer backups and cold storage over the network. This would also require putting something like a Drobo on the mini to give the OS X Server VM enough storage for the media library and other tasks that the Mini would have to absorb. This method has its advantages, as the mini and storage would be ‘local’ on USB, it would support incremental storage growth, etc. But it only has RAM space enough for 1 VM (the server), the mini is NOT a powerhouse, the bus speed is really too low for heavy use, and while it’s low power, it probably won’t stand up well to long term usage at that level. I’d probably need a cheap used Dell or something similar to run the other VMs, and I have a hardware raid card I can throw into that. Storage probably 1 TB (x2 for redundant), 8 GB of inexpensive RAM, would need another $220 in hard drives for it.

Price ballpark: .5 kilobucks.

But the options aren’t quite over. There are a set of machines called “Hackintoshes” that purport to be quasi-legally able to run Mac OS. The fact is they’re not entirely on the legal end of the stick, but may be technically capable. Do I dare risk building a machine that might run Mac OS X for half the price of a Mac Pro? Is it worth the risk? Personally, I’m inclined to wait out the lawyers. This would reduce the price of building an XServe quality unit from $3000 to $1100. That’s not insignificant.

And since I don’t need cutting-edge abilities, I could go with a used Mac Pro/XServe, which go around $1400 instead of $2500.

Then consider the selloff of the existing infrastructure components. Maybe $500 for the RAID units would be something. So we’re not entirely lost here.

Initial speed tests done by installing a 3 year old RAID card in my Windows box shows I can get a 4x network share speed increase by using a new server, so it can be done, and that box is so old it only has a 133 bus and runs the RAID card at half speed. There is much to be gained.

So what to do? Comment away, I’ll read and consider, then we’ll see what real dollars get spent.

Oh, and there was research along the way into using iSCSI to store the RAID in the garage and keep the brainy server local, but the lack of iSCSI initiators for the mac under $200 a pop discouraged me. The free one doesn’t like Snow Leopard x64 at the moment. And the option of using afp protocol on top of zfs surfaced, but the combination in FreeNAS proved unstable and the zfs availability issue keeps getting in the way. It’s possible, but the hassle doesn’t pay for the payoff in my situation.