Friday, July 1, 2011

The Beginning of something INTERESTING...





The Beginning of something INTERESTING...




So there it is... my 7 machine VMWare Cluster I've built from old PC's and cheap servers on ebay and generous folks that like to sell them cheap too :-)

The entire network is connected via a 24 port GigE Netgear Switch. Storage is supplied by 2 IBM 305 SAN Servers configured with 1TB and 2 TB's of storage being served via iSCSI connections. Each server has a Dual Gigabit NIC to the "SAN Side" of the switch, ports 16 - 24 are dedicated to SAN on the switch and vlan'd out to allow LAN and SAN traffic to coexist "nicely"

I've configured DRS on the cluster so at any point in time, each machine can be powered off to conserve power and decrease heat in the basement.


I've got plans to setup a Video feed for the basement but thats a work in progress since I have 2 webcams but no software that will work with it.



To the left there you'll see the additional shelving I setup recently - I bought the 2 Rackable's off a friend of mine and also got that Elite 8000 PC off ebay, those 3 made vmware 5, 6, and 7.




Ontop you'll see Storage3, that is now my primary SAN Server. I'm hoping to setup some sort of replication to it later in the summer so I can setup multipath - that will help with DRS later on.

Below you'll see the 24 port Netgear switch thats in use. It's a VERY nice switch, not completely managed but it's enough that the backplane can deal with all the SAN traffic.


Ontop of the switch you'll see a box labeled "Compaq" thats a 8 port KVM I picked up on ebay for 25 bucks, still haven't figured out if it works or not since it came with "screwy" Video adaptors on it. We will see how it works out.










Wednesday, April 20, 2011