Colo, Datatcenter: ease of managing life

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awedio

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Feb 24, 2012
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BTW - did you look at Proxmox VE by chance? Maybe a decent option since you are doing ZoL and such. You could then run everything using ZFS and just be done with thinking about it. You also get a GUI for KVM.

My general sense is, try to minimize the number of moving parts you have. One parity RAID solution, not hardware, Snapraid and ZFS.

How I got colocation to be absolutely a breeze was to change my perspective:
  • Ditch HW RAID for SW RAID (ZFS) or cluster (Ceph)
  • Minimize the number of hard disks used (each has a 5% AFR)
  • Ensure you have a plan for spares (e.g. when something fails)
  • Test failure well
  • Minimize management interfaces
That has me down to visiting the colo once every year or so. I now just allow stuff to fail in place.
I saw @Patrick response in another thread & I thought, wow, he brings up some great thoughts.

@Patrick can you expand on your "colo to be abs breeze" bullets?

I'm looking to make the move to a colo, but I keep asking myself "how do I manage all the assets", "are there tools that can make my life easy/simple" & "how to keep things simple but effective"?

Do I go with Hyper-V, XenServer, Proxmox etc???
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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It depends on the size. There is a major difference between 1-2 servers, 1-2 racks, and more. How big are you thinking for the installation?
 
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T_Minus

Build. Break. Fix. Repeat
Feb 15, 2015
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Great thread, going to follow along. I'm going through this exact thing right now!
Beyond management of the physical hardware there's a huge amount of data to keep on hand for each setup too!
 

awedio

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It depends on the size. There is a major difference between 1-2 servers, 1-2 racks, and more. How big are you thinking for the installation?
Starting with 1/2 a rack (20U) and being able to scale as biz grows.
 

Patrick

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At that point (assuming you have at least 5 compute nodes, look at Promxox. You are going to need to have a way to move nodes across a cluster and Proxmox does a good job at that.
 

awedio

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Feb 24, 2012
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@Patrick Can you speak a little more to the following:
How I got colocation to be absolutely a breeze was to change my perspective:
  • Ditch HW RAID for SW RAID (ZFS) or cluster (Ceph)
  • Minimize the number of hard disks used (each has a 5% AFR)
  • Ensure you have a plan for spares (e.g. when something fails)
  • Test failure well
  • Minimize management interfaces