On 12/26/2010 11:04 AM, Kwan Lowe wrote: > On Sat, Dec 25, 2010 at 2:23 PM, Ryan Wagoner<rswagoner at gmail.com> wrote: >> RAID 5 does provide speed increases for read operations. There are >> still some applications where RAID 5 has its benefits. For a smaller >> department file server 3-4 TB drives in RAID 5 works great. The money >> saved can be put towards backups, etc. Having said that I use RAID 10 >> for most applications. > I've been thinking about the whole backup/redundancy approach to > maintaining my home network. Though it is a "home" network, I use it > to support my work so though it's not business critical, it can't > tolerate much downtime. > > Two approaches that I see: > > 1) Use some form of RAID or mirroring and a backup process to provide > recoverability. > > 2) Maintain a centralized configuration in order to quickly re-build a > downed system. > > They are not completely separate, but I've been trying to move my > recovery philosophy to the latter to minimize costs. > > For example, I used to backup my DNS/LDAP server by creating a > snapshot of the Xen LVM partition. Recovery was simply a matter of > restoring the backup. > > The problem with this approach was that the number of virtual machines > started to balloon and with it, the storage requirements. Though the > images were only 10G to 20G, I had dozens of them. Not to mention > that the virtualization hosts keep changing: VMWare Server stopped > being free; The upstream vendor moved to KVM instead of Xen. > > The approach I'm taking now is to use a combination of > Kickstart/Anaconda and cfengine with the goal of removing all host > identity from a OS instance. > > For my DNS server, for example, I use kickstart to build a standard > image with a cfengine client. On bootup, cfengine pulls in the bind > configuration and within a few minutes I have a duplicate of the old > server. This is also much more resilient to changes in the underlying > VM technology. > > There are still some kinks to work out. For one, I haven't backed up > the cfengine server the same way. Supposedly it's just a matter of > making the server its own client, but right now I'm using an image > backup and rsync copies to another fileserver. > > I'm also trying to integrate a Spacewalk server into the mix. This > will allow me to rebuild a system with the exact same packages (right > now I just update to the latest). In a real production environment > this is critical as some applications may only be certified against > particular kernel/glibc/etc. versions. > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos vmware esxi is still free and it's superior to vmware server. I don't know if you have the cpu to directly support the bare-metal hypervisor though.