[CentOS] OT: Recommendations for a virtual storage server

Tue Feb 1 02:16:18 UTC 2011
Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com>

On Jan 31, 2011, at 12:20 PM, carlopmart <carlopmart at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 01/31/2011 03:57 PM, Ross Walker wrote:>>> virtual machines running on HP ML115 
> server.
>>>> 
>>>> Where is the problem?? Problem is the storage. All storage resides on the HP ML150
>>>> server. For that reason I need to install a server as a virtual storage to run most
>>>> of the virtual machines running on the server HP ML115 with the exception of
>>>> firewalls and the DMZ server that resides on the HP ML115's local disk.
>>>> 
>>>> For backups I have an external usb disk with 1TB.
>>> 
>>> You can probably make that work if you don't care much about performance, but it
>>> would be much better to toss at least one more drive in the the ML115 - and
>>> maybe more RAM in both.  Even better if you can add several drives and keep each
>>> VM that is active (the firewalls/DNS server, etc. shouldn't be busy but the
>>> squid will unless you disable the disk cache) on its own drive.  And more RAM
>>> would help too.
>> 
>> I would probably take the memory from the 115 and put it in the 150 and have 1 highly usable system instead of a .75 and .50 usable system.
>> 
>> That's if I couldn't buy more memory. I would say 8GB is a min, 16GB preferred, 32GB is great
> 
> At this moment I can't buy more RAM.
> 
> . Are these single socket or dual socket?
> 
> HP ML150 is dual socket, but ML115 not.
> 
>> 
>> Can the smart array be shared between two hosts?
> 
> No.
>> 

Then I suggest loading all the RAM from the 115 into the 150 (if it's the same type) and have a really good ESXi box and the 115 around as a spare in case the 150 fails.

When monies come available you could buy a second CPU or more RAM depending on what resource is needed most.

-Ross