So as I investigate things like Sun servers, OpenSolaris, ZFS/Raid-Z, iSCSI, Embedded NetBSD, etc etc... I start thinking that perhas a better approach would be to start off with a list of requirements... It is a little late to "start" there, but, what the hell...
* We do not want a repeat of the data wipeout we got a year ago... As such, if one domain gets hacked, it can not take down the rest of the domains.
- I had been planning on using Jail to alleviate this problem, but at this point I think our best bet is Xen
- While many OSs support Xen domU, many fewer support Xen dom0.
* Also, if a domain gets hacked and wiped out, we need a backup to restore from.
- ZFS Snapshots (maybe full weekly and incremental daily) seems like a good solution for this
- SVN might be a good solution to this
- It might be good if there was a way to automate this (ie: allow the root user to do it instead of emailing me)
* We want to get disk redundancy, while keeping cost and maintenance low.
- RAID-0 gives us the redundancy, but at a fairly high cost. The current 1TB gives us less than 500GB this way.
- RAID-5 could be acceptable, as long as we could fix the system if the root partition were the one to screw up
- ZFS and Raid-Z seem like excellent options to provide the redundancy and automatic corrections
* Each domain should be able to have it's own root user and OS.
- Jail could have provided for this, but seems very buggy ('man man' in a jail crashed the entire OS)
- Xen should allow for this fairly easy. As such, the base OS really doesn't do anything other than launch the domUs.
* If multiple OSs share a base OS, it would be nice (though not required) if we were able to not waste a lot of duplicated space
- Unionfs is ideal for this. Not sure how easy it is to use with Xen
- At some point, it has to be better to have a full copy (like if they upgraded every single app)
* It would be preferable if all OS's could run unmodified, thus allowing us greater flexibility and choices
- Intel VT or AMD-V technology. If we are planning on doing any RSA work on any domain, it can't be the Intel option. So probably an Opteron 2xxx (or 2).
* If we run low on drive space, it should be fairly simple to add more
- ZFS is supposed to allow for this with 'zfs add'
- We *could* do separate drives for each domain, but that would waste a lot of drive space
- iSCSI might be a better option than internal drives for this. Instead of running out of hard drive bays, we'd just have to worry about running out of ethernet ports -- which realistically, is much easier to come up with more of. ** SEE BELOW
** iSCSI Thoughts:
- IDEALLY, I would have a set of cheap 250GB or 500GB drives that host themselves as iSCSI Targets. Then, adding new drives is literally adding another drive to the network.
- We could, in theory, run Solaris or NetBSD to easily provide iSCSI Targets to the network - but then we have to wonder why we are creating a separate box to host Xen
- If we have multiple iSCSI Targets, which our Solaris(?) box were to RAID-Z together, we could also have extra iSCSI Targets that VMWare and/or other hardware could use directly (even Windows)
- If we have multiple iSCSI Targets, which our Solaris(?) box were to RAID-Z together, the Solaris box could provide the pool as a iSCSCI Target to other devices/OSes
- If we were to have Solaris running RAID-Z directly on the iSCSI Target (ie: providing ZFS pools as iSCSI Targets), then separate Xen domUs could point to these iSCSI Targets for their primary data storage and POTENTIALLY get the ZFS benefits regardless of their OS (snapshots, error-correction [at least from hardware errors], etc)
- In theory, if we could come up with mini embeddable systems that could boot from iSCSI Targets, then we could do away with Xen entirely and just have a little device on the network for each domain... this might be overkill
- Note: Can Solaris boot off iSCSI?
