Changes
These last couple weeks I’m taking a look at some major infrastructure changes. We’re looking at doing a gadget for Yahoo which means I had chance to implement some new infrastructure options. Things which I’d thought about at one time or another or someone else had brought up to me in the office and was waiting on a good project to test implementation.
The first decision was servers and I decided to shop some used Dell 1950s. Recently I bought a dual quadcore HP G5 with 16GB RAM for about the same price I got 5 dual dualcore Dell 1950s with 16GB RAM from Stallard. While there isn’t much like a fresh from the box server, the amount of compute power for the dollar I can get with a set of these older servers is amazing. They still have virtualization extensions and I’m getting 20 rather than 8 cores, 80 rather than 16GB or RAM and 5x as much potential throughput. I think it’s a win thus far.
Next up is a switch from Redhat Xen to VMWare ESXi. I like Redhat and I’ve been working in it for most of my career, the problem with Xen is that it doesn’t have a decent administration interface that I can get someone else excited about using. VMWare just make too many things simple that are ugly in Xen. [ One thing it doesn’t make simple is installing the damn management client if you are not a Windows user, someone in corporate needs to realize how silly that factor is. ] Once the client is up and running the process of connecting to the host, adding servers and allocating resources is a breeze. The built in reporting functions and monitoring of resources is another nice bonus. The biggest reason for all of this is that we’re running VMWare in the office, so this could possibly consolidate our two hypervisor environments down to one, enable quick DR and our office syadmin to better cover my ass when I’m on vacation (and me cover his too I suppose).
Along with the switch to ESXi is a switch to Ubuntu. The nice thing with running Redhat Xen as your hypervisor is that you can run four or unlimited guests, depending upon which subscription level you purchase. The flip on this is that unlimited subscription costs a yearly $1000 fee on a piece of hardware I just paid about $1000 for, that seems wrong in concept. This leads me back to Ubuntu server being the guest to work with here, in a few choice places we’ve been running server flawlessly since 6.06LTS already. I love Ubuntu desktop and of our four developers I would say two of them are fluent in Ubuntu, this leads to potential for leveraging current knowledge bases.
Thus far I’ve got a couple of the hosts built out and basic builds of the variety of servers well need for this project: memcache, mysql and apache/passenger. All this is the simple stuff and over the next week will be getting them ready for dropping webistrano builds some F5 load balancing followed by hardcore load testing. The interesting thing will be whether skipping out on the para-virtualization I adore is going to cause too much of a resource hit to make the switch work.