I saw @Patrick response in another thread & I thought, wow, he brings up some great thoughts.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:
That has me down to visiting the colo once every year or so. I now just allow stuff to fail in place.
- 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
@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???