Personal computing discussed
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LaChupacabra wrote:With the announcement that Red Hat made today...
Buub wrote:LaChupacabra wrote:With the announcement that Red Hat made today...
What announcement?
kc77 wrote:The defaults might be slightly different but there's not much that's going to change your experience. Now the file system you choose and the bandwidth you have between your host and the datastore, those are some of the things that can make massive differences.
LaChupacabra wrote:Agreed. The reason behind settling on CentOS was about using the Dell Open Manage tools. Using a product like Nexenta or FreeNAS means running the build as the vendor sees fit to implement it. It's a forest for the trees situation. They will tell you if a drive is down, but they do not monitor things like the temperature sensors in the server. To me that is a big deal. Reliability is more important than performance. The tools also allow you to do things like live firmware updates. I haven't been able to check on the Nexenta appliance, but my feeling is the previous admin here didn't believe in firmware updates. In my previous life as a consultant I had 2 clients that lost whole servers due to disk corruption caused by a bug in Dell's backplane firmware. It was my job to clean that up. If their previous provider had simply applied the firmware updates the corruption never would have happened.
It sounds like you have some experience with Xen. I'm setting this up as shared storage for 2 hypervisors. Do you have any recommendations for file system and formatting of the drives? Again, reliability is paramount. But if swapping EXT3 for 4 or NFS for iSCSI will create speed gains it'd be silly to not explore them.
kc77 wrote:Do you have extra money to spend?
Is the datastore / storage appliance meant to service other things than just Xen within your data center?
clone wrote:apparently Ubuntu is bloated with spyware.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP8CNp-vksc
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/p ... data-leaks
LaChupacabra wrote:I haven't been able to check on the Nexenta appliance, but my feeling is the previous admin here didn't believe in firmware updates. In my previous life as a consultant I had 2 clients that lost whole servers due to disk corruption caused by a bug in Dell's backplane firmware. It was my job to clean that up. If their previous provider had simply applied the firmware updates the corruption never would have happened.
Scrotos wrote:Though sometimes applying firmware makes things worse:
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2 ... ned-drives
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/ProLiant-S ... -p/4654411
I'm in the pro-firmware camp but man, you can't even rely on vendors to test this stuff, what hope do you have on your own? I'm glad I didn't get bitten by that on a production server.
just brew it! wrote:Buub wrote:LaChupacabra wrote:With the announcement that Red Hat made today...
What announcement?
Red Hat is collaborating with CentOS now. Not quite sure what to make of this myself.
It could be an attempt to counter to what Red Hat perceives as a threat from other "free" server OSes (Ubuntu Server and Debian). By bringing the free server distro that is most closely related to RHEL under the official Red Hat umbrella they may attract some of the people who would otherwise run a Debian derivative to the Red Hat camp.
I've also seen some comments to the effect that it is an attempt to shut down Oracle Linux. In effect, sending a message of "Why use Oracle's RHEL clone when you can use ours?"
There's also a potential downside for CentOS over the long term if Red Hat takes over critical responsibilities then loses interest.
LaChupacabra wrote:kc77 wrote:Do you have extra money to spend?
Is the datastore / storage appliance meant to service other things than just Xen within your data center?
Not really, part of the problem is I work at a non profit. I'm dealing with the sunk costs of the systems that were put in a year or two ago. That's why re purposing existing hardware is fine, but investing in new software is not.
It will be used primarily as storage for Xen. One of the above volumes is going to be dedicated to that. The other volume will be used as a backup target for our virtaul backups and half a dozen things that just need bulk storage accessible via nfs or samba. I have a second rack in an ISP's datacenter close to our offices with a similar setup. The servers are not replicated directly (didn't have the budget) but the virtual backups do replicate, as well as the datastores that contain those half dozen archives. There are 2 Xen hypervisors there that run various things like XenApp and our websites. We've got a tunnel running between our main offices and that second location.
I think that's everything relevant to give a good idea of what this needs to do. I've got CentOS 6.5 up and running on a test box and am starting to carve that up to do what this needs to do. I'm happy to answer any other questions people may have! I'm also super grateful for the help people have already offered =)
kc77 wrote:For the file system Ext4 + LVM2+MDADM with RAID 10 and RAID 1 for the OS.