Changing Blog to WordPress
If you are reading this blog, please note that I've moved it to wordpress and the new url is:
http://igraphicsgroup.com/blogwp
Thanks!
November 26, 2010
November 12, 2010
Office; the never ending reorganization
The physical reorganization is going nicely. The additional of 2 new shelving units has allowed us to (finally) organize all the equipment into one location. Now that my back is finally starting to recover it is time to update the logical structure.
Right now, we have several systems running virtual machines. We have an older ESXi server that runs a few older development systems. We also have a subversion server running on a Linux VM, and a mail server running under Hyper-V.
Essentially, we have four systems running different hypervisors: ESXi 3.5, VMware Workstation, Hyper-V and VMware Server 1.0.
This will be changing next week. A new project is forcing us to expand our testing capabilities, and the Dell Outlet had a very nice server at a good price!
We picked up a dual processor T710 with 48GB of Ram to run VMware vSphere 4.1; the Essentials version is only $611. We’ll put a few TB of storage on it, and be able to migrate all the existing VM’s, as well as all the new ones to it.
Our existing ESXi server will be transitioning to the backup server role. I’ve been wanting to try out Openfiler, and this will give me a chance. After another purchase at Newegg, we have an external enclosure, and 12 TB of RAID storage for backup data. We’ll use external drives to archive the data.
This project will allow us to repurpose (or retire) three existing servers and add 10 new “testing” VMs, which will be available all the time! It also allows us to consolidate our backups to a single backup server.
We’re still unsure what third party backup tool to use with vSphere. There are many options, with differing price points. We’re going to start with Veeam FastSCP, since it’s free (and what we are using now).
Over the next several months we will use the 30 day free trials to test the following tools:
Right now I’m leaning towards Veeam due to it’s ability to restore single files from a VM. To be honest, if it works well enough, I won’t even test the other tools.
