Lester Cheung's questions

I found myself constantly wasting time in dealing with hardware and would like to do something about it. Personally I have a Macbook that does all the mail/IM/IRC/browsing/music/devel VM and what not. I store mission critical data on a Solaris box with ZFS. Most of the development /production work is run under Linux - either on bare metal or under Linux KVM.

It would be nice to have a box that does all of these at my desk or at home - have anything actually done that? My requirement is simply:

• being able to run VMs for prototypes and software testing

• provides a reliable storage to host all the data + random backup

• doesn't cost an arm and a leg (i.e. whitebox)

I can see 2 options:-

• a Linux box with RAID1 and KVM - I lose filesystem snapshots and all the solaris goodness

• a Solaris box with ZFS and xVM server - I never managed to get it to work with commodity hardware - remember this is for a workstation/desktop.

So to my fellow SAs: what kind of setup do you have?

[Answering my own question 3 years after]

At home, I have:

• a HP microserver that runs KVM for all sort of stuff 24x7
• a custom box with a 3RU rackmount from Norco
• a macbook air for everything else.

At work, I use:

• a 27" iMac as desktop
  • whatever server the company provided for heavy workload.

VMWare Fusion was installed on both the macbook and iMac but it's getting less use these days...

As a system designer, would you put VMs responsible for core infrastructure (dns/dhcp/directory/web/wiki/repos/file share etc) and VMs used for development and testing on the same physical machine?

My take:

For

• better hardware utilization - most IT VM has relatively low load
• ability to spend more on better hardware /w $ coming from different projects
• less overall spending

Against

• IT and development probably have different (separate) budget anyway
• runaway development VMs may have adverse effect to core IT services