Server Virtualization

Another big part of my summer upgrades is server virtualization.  I was able to purchase 2 VMWare certified servers from Aberdeen for less than Dell, HP and they come with a five year warranty.  I also bought another server that I will use without virtualization.  That third server will run network services, printing, DNS, DHCP and our disk based back ups. I felt that because it is such an important server I did not want to add a layer of complexity at his time.  Maybe in the future.

A quick digression on sserver naming.  I do not use cryptic but rational names like HS_01_files.  Out district’s team mascot is a pirate, so all of our servers are named after pirates.  When I was naming our virtual hosts, instead of pirates, I named them after pirate ships.  So we have the host server Dorada with virtual machines like Hook, Lafitte and Crunch.  For you trivia buffs figure out the significance of the name Dorada.

So back to planning.  The two host servers are each dual quad-core Intel processors, 2.2ghz.  There is 32 gb of RAM and a hardware RAID array with about a terrabyte of storage. The server has two gigabit Ethernet ports.  The first server, Guppy, will host three virtual machines.  One for our student management system running on Ubuntu.  The second will host our financial database running on Suse and the third is for those apps that can’t live without Windows, in this case Windows 2003 server.  The only version of Linux our financial database will support is Suse.  All other instance of Linux are Ubuntu.  I decided to give each Linux server 2 processors, 2 gig of RAM and 200 gb of hard drive space.  Windows I gave 4 processors, 2 gig of RAM and 200 gb of hard drive.  All three servers are 32 bit systems because of application support issues, that is way they have only 2gb of RAM.  This was the easy server to provision.  Most of the decisions were made for me.  The Windows virtual machine will host Skyward, Spectrum (library automation), Accelerated reader, Riverdeep software, and some keyboarding programs.

Enough for today.  Next time more on my planning for the upgrade.  I have also started trying to figure out this Wiki thing.  I hope to have how to documents up for group collaboration.