Around 2 months ago, I decided to get a 2nd one, for backups – again: 4x 1TB drives.

On Sunday night, I ordered a 3rd 4-bay and a 2-bay. It’s simply explained why: I was running out of storage

The new 4-bay box just got 4x 1.5TB HDs and is mainly meant to be the backup device in the house. With available 4.5TB it’s a good storage for the important data.

The 2-bay variant is for my company data. Funny enough, I create not that much company data, but the stuff I store should be save and reliable. It’s already backed up to Amazon S3, but I wanted to use a RAID1. Before, I tried a software RAID on OSX, attaching 2x HDs into a RAID1, but this really sucks. The new 2-bay will have 2x 640GB WD HDs, that I’ve on stock (+1 in case on HD fails). It’s always good to have a backup plan, guys!

The other “toy” that arrived today has to do with my internet connection. My Telekom contract will end of next month and I decided to also switch the “main” line to Vodafone, who are now able to give me a 16Mbps line (nearly, it’s 13Mbps). So I will use both of them and do Load Balancing. To do this, I need this cool router from Cisco.

It allows me to combine 2 DSL lines and get (using crunching tools like SpeedDownload oder JDownload) up to 2.6MByte/s. That’s nice and useful when I do larger downloads.

Update
Since this morning I’m trying to get the 4-bay box to work. I’ve installed 2x WD Caviar Green 1.5TB “EARS” series + 2x Samsung HD154UI. When I put it into RAID5, I get the size of (shocking) 2.2TB. If I use RAID0 for a test (never do that live), I get ALSO 2.2TB, which should be 6TB.

I’ve mailed with the Onnto support who told me to use RAID drives – ah yeah.. those superexpensive Enterprise class HDs. Ha! No – in my other boxed, WDs are running fine (Desktop Caviar Green and mixed revisions).

When I put 2x 1.5TB into a RAID0 (Samsung OR WD), I get 3TB as expected, if I mix Samsung + WD, I get: 2.2TB.

Now, I’d a 3rd WD Caviar Green 1.5TB EARS laying here, so I tried it with 3x WDs in RAID5 and… 2.2TB. ARGH!

Seems like my disks are NOT compatible with this box. Seems like I need to send it back damn…

Here’s my “evil secret plan”:

You may ask: WHY?

That’s a good question. First of all, I must say that I like the hardware of the DELL server. It was fast, pretty cheap for a server of this class, BUT it contains one thing that bugged me: I had to run Windows Server or Linux or UNIX. That’s ALL not very compatible with our clients, which are (as you can see in the diagram) all Macs. While fighting with the server and testing out different things like VMware ESXi, Linux and again even OpenSolaris, I was everytime overwhelmed. Also, it took too much of my time that I urgently need for my company stuff (means: working for my clients instead configuring the LAN).

With these things in mind, I decided that the idea from Danny Choo (scroll down until you see the Mac Minis ) is the best, also for me. Simply getting 2 used Mac Minis, attaching some external storage and having fun with an easy OS.

No way would I want to create a “REAL” server with Mailserver, iCal-Server etc. on my own, but for making the sharing easy, I used Mac OS X Server 10.6 that I had laying around for the “Business” machine. The “private” machine is running on a regular Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.(4).

I’m still a bit shocked how well the machines are working. Even if the stuff is +1year old, they are behaving very well and are doing their jobs better than expected.

Of course, everything has to fit into the new rack. Here are some photos of how I’ve managed to get everything in. It’s a great rack and it was really fun to put the stuff into the rack. Yeah I know, it’s not really meant to sit in a 19″ rack, but that’s ok

I’m very sure you’d like to see more photos, so don’t hesitate and check my flickr photos: http://dkle.in/rackjuly

Ciao
Dennis 

What is Belldandy?

Belldandy is a name of a fictional person, used in the Manga “Oh! My goddess“, one of my favorite comics. Reading this post, you will see that I use more japanese comic names for virtual machines.

But what is YOUR Belldandy?

Well, Belldandy is the name of my newest server. I write “newest”, because over the years I tried so much different systems and types of servers, that I’m really happy to announce a very stable server here.

What kind of server is it?

It’s a self-build one, but I used hardware parts that where recommended from Constantin Gonzalez from Sun. I’m using my old but very reliable TAGAN 450W power supply, an ASUS M4A78LT-M AMD mainboard which supports ECC memory and 6GB of ECC RAM. The OS harddisk is a new 160GB IDE HD. It’s not a 19″ server – it’s a regular Midi tower (MESH series by Chieftec).

Why IDE? Isn’t this a rather old standard? What about SATA?

I’m using all 6 onboard SATA ports for the zpool. IDE may be an old standard, but it works fine for the OS itself. With 6GB of RAM I don’t think too much about HD IOs on this HD. It’s more important, that the zpools are bound to a fast bus. I simply found it a waste of an port using a SATA HD for the system.

So you’ve 6 HDs inside the server?

Yes! I’ve installed 6x 1TB WD “Green” HDs into the server. Those are connected to the zpool “storage” which is the main storage of the server.

What is that “zpool”?

zpool is pool of HDs you’ve virtually stacked into one large virtual HD. It’s widely comparable to RAID, but it offers a lot advantages compared to a traditional RAID. I’m using 3x Mirror drives. Each mirror contains 2 HDs with the capacity of 1TB each. Together, because they are internally mirrored, I’ve 50% of the capacity. If you want to learn more about zpool and ZFS, I could highly recommend googling for it – there are tons of interesting and funny material out there.

Why do you mirror? Are your HDs so bad?

No It’s a thing of security for my data. Harddisks are not made forever and the fail. The question is just: When. Having a mirror protects my data from getting lost when one or more HDs are crashing the same time. Of course, if it’s a series issue, maybe I’m also not secured against this – 3 HDs where bought at the same day, but I think it’s a very way which let’s me sleep deep.

Which OS is that? Linux?

No, I’m running OpenSolaris which is something between Linux and UNIX, I would think it contains the best of both worlds. It’s mainly based on Sun’s Solaris but with a GNome environment. It’s a great system, but I’m also rather new to it, so I need to learn a lot about it. It’s amazingly pretty easy to create storages and zpools.

How do you connect to your server from your clients?

I’ve installed netatalk on the OpenSolaris machine to be able to use it with our Macs. It’s pretty much forward. A bad idea is to use SMB and Macs, there seems to be a bug inside the Finder’s SMB implementation. Anyway – it’s cool to have AFP running (netatalk).

Of course, I could always use the SCP protocol to connect to the server if I need to, but that’s more useful for the administration than for normal usage.

Isn’t it loud? Have you stored it in your office?

It’s really too loud as I’ve installed 4 very efficient fans into the server. I had it for a couple of days in our office and it was not very comfortable, so we decided to putit into the basement. I honestly prefer a quiet office (even music sometimes annoys me and I’m working mostly in silence).

You have some external boxes on that desk – what are they for?

The bigger box is a great box – it is my Onnto DataTale. It allows me to put 4 HDs into and comes with a hardware RAID. I’ve currently installed 4x 640GB WD Blue HDs and connected it via eSATA to the server to store temporary data onto. It gives me 1.8TB of usable storage.

What are these other 4 boxes for?

That’s (from left to right) a Seagate Desktop drive, a MacPower enclosure with another 1TB Seagate HD inside and 2 Hitachi external HDs. They are all connected via a USB2-Hub to the server and are set up as an RAIDz1 backup zpool. It gives me 2.7TB of available storage for backing up our data. RAIDz1 is more or less comparable with RAID5.

How do you connect the server to the internet, or is it an offline server for local use only?

It’s connected directly to the internet and out 2 DSL lines. OpenSolaris itself is connected to the Vodafone line which offers a fix IP and NO disconnect every 24h’s, so it’s a real and cheap dedicated line. It gives me 6MBit/s download and 640KBit/s upload. So or so, I don’t run any services on the host system itself for protection. The other line is from the Deutsche Telekom and allows us to surf with 16MBit/s (1MBit/s upstream). This is mostly used for the clients only.

Do you run any virtual machine on the server?

Yes, indeed. I run 2x Debian (“Urd” & “Mila”) (one as development machine for my web design & development, the other as media streaming device (namely Firefly iTunes server or “mt-daapd)). I also run a Windows Server (“Miyuki”) on the server as mailserver. It’s a Windows Server 2008 r2 x64 with an Exchange 2010 installed on top of it. If Microsoft creates a great product, it’s in my mind Exchange. And I say that as Mac user

Which software do you use to virtualize this stuff?

Sun gives away their virtualization software VirtualBox for free – and of course it runs fantastic on their own OpenSolaris. I’m very happy that it runs so well.

On my clients we run Parallels on my Mac Pro for Windows virtualization and my wife is running a VMWare Fusion on her MacBook for Windows 7.

Do you have a firewall installed in your rack?

Yes and no, I’ve a IBM NetVista mounted inside the rack. It’s a very small and slow machine – a Thin Client – but it’s fantastic to run IPCop on. Currently, because it was a long road to get to this very satisfying server, it’s switched off, but I will turn it on again soon, and even if it’s for local proxy, free DNS servers and local DNS (don’t you guys also hate to type IPs for LAN servers? ).

How much HD capacity/usable capacity have you attached to Belldandy?

- 6x 1 TB internal
- 1x 160 GB internal
- 4x 640 GB external
- 4x 1 TB external

Makes around about 12 TB of storage, I can use up to 7,8 TB for real storage. There’s a lot of overhead for security, but I think it’s really worth it. ZFS as filesystem itself is very secure, but in this combination, it’s fantastic and I’m really looking forward to have a permanent server. In case I want to try something else, I will now simply create a new VM to play with instead of killing the server itself.

Do you run Linux anywhere?

I do! “Obelix” – my dedicated webserver runs Debian Lenny, the 2 virtual machines are also both Debian and IPCop is also based on Linux. I would say, I’m using a good mix of the different operating systems.

Many thanks for reading this post! Hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed typing it

Ciao
Dennis