ryv's blog

Since my last post, I've tried a bunch of different things with this box. These include: Xenserver with the following virtual machines: Ubuntu Server Windows Home Server 2011 FreeNAS DragonflyBSD Ubuntu Server Linux Mint 13 Having the 2TB mirror has caused many of the problems. FreeNAS simply crashed and used 100% of CPU the as soon as I tried to copy a file. Dragonfly wouldn't install. Ubuntu took 4 days to build a software RAID and then when we had a power failure, the RAID failed to build again. There was a lot of frustration and perhaps a cranky swear word or two. Eventually I decided to follow this route: Installed Linux Mint 13 on the box, set up a software RAID for the large disks, and left the other disks simply as an install disk and an archive disk.  moved all the data from my Netgear Stora to the new server I've deployed it to replace my server and my media PC, allowing me to ditch two PCs, one UPS and the Stora. Yes I'm going a bit

Since my last post (in amongst family and work and stuff) I've been playing with Xenserver and the N40L Microserver. Here's how it's gone down: The initial install went quite well, except I had configured two mirrored RAID arrays - one with 2 x 1TB disks, the other with 2 x 2TB disks. Xenserver saw neither of them. So I removed both arrays, set the SATA controller back to AHCI and went from there. After a quick re-install, I had an initial local storage of 1TB. Following this I added three more local storage devices and re-thought how I was going to do the installation of my VMs. Following the exceptional directions on creating an Ubuntu 12.04LTS server on Xenserver from http://www.invalidlogic.com/2012/05/01/deploying-ubuntu-12-04-on-xenserver-made-easy  I created a 12.04 Ubuntu virtual server - all went very well. In accordance with my plan, I also created a Windows Home Server 2011 using the Windows 2008R2 template. The WHS2011 server was so slow to install, setup

I took delivery today of my brand new HP N40L Microserver. I plan to use it to replace my existing whitebox server, Netgear Stora and add to my network at home. The idea is to install Citrix XenServer on this little box, then virtual guests running Ubuntu 10.04LTS, Windows Server (of some variety - 2008R2 or maybe Windows Home Server) and if required FreeNAS or another *BSD product (for fun). The default N40L comes with 2GB of RAM, 250GB HDD and a 1.5GHz processor. I've updated the RAM to 8GB of RAM and I'll put a couple of 2TB HDDs in and probably 2 1TB HDDs disks as well.   The idea is then to set up two RAID arrays - one for the install of operating systems and associated applications, one as a storage pool for data (hopefully 2TB will be enough initially). I'll look into using 4 x 2TB disks in RAID10 and see what happens. Here we go!