Why didn’t anyone tell me…

In my previous post on the topic, I presented a couple alternative ways to get a lot of home infrastructure with little redundancy and some virtualization. The fact is, it’s pricey to do it ‘properly’. So I set out to look at the pros and cons of some alternative methods that make it a more practical for home (a.k.a. cheapskate) implementation.

Know thyself

Part of the problem I realized is that I probably don’t need an 8-core Xeon server on 24/7/365 to power my firewall and backup streaming (sorry Apple!). As much as I’d love to have one, I just can’t justify the amount of calories it would produce and feed into my [garage|basement] and the number of kilowatt-hours it would consume. Even with clever power management schemes as turning it off during the 1 A.M. to 1 P.M. periods, spinning down hard drives, etc., I’m just not using that much processor that much time. So I started dividing up jobs into two major categories: always-on services vs. on-demand services. Then I came up with this list, which I’m sure will be different than other people’s:

Always On:

• PPPoE dialer
• Firewall/router/gateway
• wifi-n access point
• DHCP
• dyndns.com updater daemon
• Remote access; VPN, Back to my Mac, whatever
• iCal server; reachable from the outside
• vCenter, maybe; reachable from the outside
• Backup server (RAID, growable)
• PS3 media server (or by schedule, details later) (RAID, growable)
• Web proxy
• “Warm storage” file server – stuff that can go to cold storage if unused for a while
• Home control software (lights, security, HVAC, whatever)
• [unplanned] MythTV backend

On Demand:

• Quicken
• Audiobook downloads
• Video encoding
• Work-VPN VM (it’s just easier this way)
• iTunes to manage files in PS3 media server directories
• daily use items (raw hardware)
• Games (raw hardware)

Note that I have re-ordered this list to make grouping them easier than I had originally done on paper.

Group into hardware

At this point I started drawing circles around things that were obviously easy to tie together, such as the first 5 items. These are currently done by my $80 linksys router with a power draw of something like 10w and almost no maintenance or downtime. Hard to argue with that. So I left those together. Then I looked at how I want to access my home resources from work (or the road) and decided that I still like Back to my Mac as an easy way to get in and see if I really do have that video on my home iTunes server. So that’s not hard. It’s functional so long as I feel like coughing up for the $100/yr service. Which I may be able to stop doing after this project is over. But I digress. The next set of things on the list is the set of “services provided from home”. A free account with dyndns.com or similar services allow me to reach home, so long as the bandwidth and processor power required to provide these to basically myself any my immediate family is small, I don’t need to shell out to a remote company to provide it. So I can host my own iCal server. It’s even open source if I don’t care to come up with an OS X Server license.

Now we get into the range of things that I really had a hard time deciding I could live with leaving in their current state. The backup server and the media server. Currently I have a pair of beat up ReadyNAS sparc-based units. One I bought new after a particularly bad hard drive crash, and the other I bought in a ‘company is folding, see if it works’ sale. I love these units for three main reasons: 1. they don’t need a lot of playing with. 2. they grow the shared volumes without me having to do much work to make it happen. 3. they don’t use a whole lot of power. But: these much older units that I have are not really good at sharing time. As single-purpose appliances they shine, especially because you can let them resize the volume by just inserting new drives. And they don’t ask for lots of maintenance upgrades and security upgrades, etc. They really are great little units if you can find them under $600. So with the luxury of having two already on hand, I decided that with jumbo frames turned on at both ends and a suitable Netgear switch in the middle, they really do perform these two jobs quite suitably. So my cheapest and most sane option is to repurpose them as dedicated appliances instead of general-purpose storage systems. And I also realized this was my migration path – essentially turn them into hardware incarnations of the VMs that they will be replaced by in the eventual ideal solution. This made me happy. So now I can dedicate one to be the growable backup unit and the other to be the growable media server unit. Which they already do.

Web proxy is honestly an optional extra I’d love to implement if I can arrange it. It has its own pitfalls, as the fabled “one more thing to go wrong” as well as being something else to maintain – something I’m usually quite set against. It’s there, we’ll see if it can be done.

“Warm storage” is the place I put things like setup files for downloaded products, project files for Audiobook Builder, iMovie project files I’m done working on but not ready to shelve, that kind of thing. Anything that is in warm storage for about 6 months will eventually get moved to offline cold storage and kept powered off, in a box, either at work or at home. As this is something that I want access to and won’t use often, and really is just about a terabyte of things that I’m not quite done with yet, I could group this with the hardware that does the backups. Speed isn’t an issue, just the access and the space, as these are quite regularly bigger than a DVD. Again, as this could easily be defined as something like a FreeNAS VM or a slice of a file server VM, I don’t mind this as a standalone role that can be virtualized in the final ideal solution.

Now we’re down to the on-demand services. Re-evaluating what these roles are helped me see that most of this can be handled in two places before the “final ideal solution” comes around. Currently the Quicken VM lives on my laptop. The Audiobook downloader lives on my low power mini server at home. Video encoding is done on the native OS of the mini server. The work VPN VM is on my laptop, as that’s where I use it most often. The iTunes library is on the native OS of the mini. I don’t mind this arrangement, but it helped me realize again the eventual arrangement in virtual machines I’d like to use, breaking them into specific roles let me see the migration path as hardware permits.

Now that I have the new role-based model to help me see what is where now and where I want it to be later, I came up with this diagram:

Big line flow charty thing

There are still a few stray points to clear up. I could entirely abandon the Linksys if I can find a way to control a wifi card like an access point. I don’t have to give up my growable storage arrays yet, but I could if I can find a 3ware card and enough drive bays (I already have, next post, I swear).

Note that this is just the role flowchart. I have additional charts that I’m working on to deal with network paths, storage, and so on. It’s not a trivial study as I originally thought. But there you have the original thoughts on how to organize it into hardware groups in a more realistic home environment.