Few more notes on the server

The parts came a few days after my previous post, and I built the machine.  Here are a few notes for those who might be doing something similar.

Operating System. I cycled through WinXP 64bit, Vista, Ubuntu Server LTS 8.04, Ubuntu Server 9, and Windows Server 2008 before re-settling on Ubuntu Server 9.  Although not thoroughly satisfied by any of those operating systems, the main decision came down to random driver support, os overhead, and raid support. I began with a hardware raid 5 through the intel matrix raid controller. This worked ok, but forced me to move to operating systems to supported it nicely (XP does not do a good job with 64bit drivers and hardware support). Windows based systems were nice, but they did not support the raid controller natively. I had the OS run from a non-redundant drive for a while because of this problem. Ubuntu 8.04 was nice in theory, but it did not support my graphics card. I’m quite satisfied with Ubuntu 9, which I will get into the details of later. I’m running it headless, which is kind of a downside, since I get a warm fuzzy feeling by having a gui even if it’s just to hold multiple terminal windows.

Raid. This was a pain. Raid 5 was wonderful until I realized the the I/O performance would be horrible. This was compounded by the fact that I ran the VMs off the same volume as my data. Thus, swap occupied the same physical drives as movies/data/etc, and that made running the machines while copying files a disaster. Raid 5 also was surprisingly bad at writes even without that. To top it all off, it only made sense to use 3+ drives with Raid 5, so I didn’t have any other drives left for raid. So finally.. I decided to split it up into two raid disks, Raid 1 (1TB) and another Raid 1 (1TB). One houses the operating system and low frequency data (e.g. multimedia), and the other stores data that either I change regularly or is used in any heavy way (e.g. market data).

VMWare Server. I ran workstation for a while when I was on windows. The combination of workstation + windows meant that entire gigs of memory disapeared for no apparent memory. The result was I swiched to VMWare server for Ubuntu. The benfits were: it’s free (really!), it runs headless with a web gui, and it scales memory much better (e.g. it swaps unused segments, which hurts performance marginally and lets you allocate a lot more ram per machine). The disadvantages are that the web gui sucks, especially for things like adding/removing hardware or reconfiguring virtual disks. Despite that, I highly recommend it.

Some things I haven’t figured out: 1. Configuring virtual networks in vmware server seems like a command line affair, which I haven’t gotten to.  2. My UPS is not supported out of the box by Ubuntu, and NUT has been horrifically hard to set up. In windows all I had to do was run an install and forget it. I might have to hook up the UPS to a separate computer and run a shutdown script remotely.

All in all, it has been a mini adventure. Now I’m re-running backups with Mozy, which will probably finish by the end of this week — a full month after I started this project. I’m very happy with how it turned out.