I am looking to upgrade servers and am trying to figure out a good plan.
We currently have 4 servers:
- OpenBSD firewall/VPN server
- FreeNAS backup servers (local) that receives ZFS snapshots
- FreeNAS backup servers (remote) that receives ZFS snapshots
- The workhorse FreeBSD server below.
FreeBSD Server
~2010 FreeBSD 8.4, 32gb ram, dual Xeon E5520 ZFS (8 disks, zraid of disks in mirrored pairs, 8TB)
Services:
- Samba
- Netatalk (Apple filesharing)
- Apache (mostly internal, some external facing sites)
- MySQL
- VirtualBox (Windows 2k3 instance)
- ZFS snapshots
My Plan (basic)
I am planning a server upgrade that would have us switch from one primary server to two servers that would each take some of the server duties from the list above (and would replicate to each other) so that if one goes down, I could rapidly activate all features on the second. Something like:
Server 1:
- Samba
- Netatalk (Apple filesharing)
- VirtualBox (Windows 2k3 instance)
- ZFS snapshots
Server 2:
- Apache (mostly internal, some external facing sites)
- MySQL
- ZFS snapshots
I've only ever run bare metal, and I have no experience with VMs other than running Windows 2k3 on VirtualBox. Should I look at running my server instances as VMs? I thought that might make restoring from a crash easier. In general, does this seem like a good plan?
I've been looking at ixSystems servers and Dell rack hardware, if that makes a difference. (I also have never used any rack mount equipment.)