Every computer here in my office is not really a static construction. Some things quickly change – and it’s pretty hard to keep up with forum signatures for example A server should not be changed often – in this case, it was a minor software-based change – but with a very nice effect.

I was running my first VMs on the NFS share from the half-virtualized Debian Fileserver. That was working well – but could be faster. So I decided to simply plug my 3x 640GB HD SFF-8087 from the HP SAS Expander to the RAIDable other Intel/LSI controller and create a RAID10e of it. RAID10e is a funny RAID that allows you to use also 3,5,7 etc. HDs as a Mirror. As result, I’ve got a ~900GB RAID10e storage that is luckily recognized by ESXi (the controller itself is supported). This is a very fast storage for my VMs. I still use my 2.5″ drives in the server to store the ISOs on. Of course, I could do this also on the NFS share, but to have a copy of them is a good idea.

As the big storage on the half-virtualized fileserver is about 10TB, I don’t really care to create a TimeMachine space there. There’s really enough free space and doing this is on my very long “ToDo” list. At the moment, I’m restoring my data from the backup server back to the fileserver using “curlftpfs” – that is a very nice FUSE add-on for Linux which allows you to rsync files from a FTP share (you mount it like a drive, a Samba share…). I now receive the files at ~120MB/s.

The backup server will receive a new network card – I found a Dual Port Intel PCI-X card (HP labeled) for just 9€. The board does not have a full PCI-X slot, but I was told that it will work, even if it’s a regular PCI slot. At this price, I bought 2 of these cards – one for the gateway – that would allow me to create a nice pfsense router from a Futro (I will get a second one tomorrow ) – so one for gateway + one for router. I just hope the card is not too long – otherwise I need to cut the case a bit…