collegegeek.org

Sometime after I get back to Kentucky, I’m thinking of building a server for running virtual machines using VMware Server 2.0. The idea is to virtualize as many of my machines as possible.  Virtual servers, in particular, benefit from this by being able to be easily moved or cloned.  Rather than having to take a server down for upgrades, you have the  ability to clone the VM, apply the upgrade to the clone, then switch them out, resulting in nearly zero downtime.

In addition to running web and mail servers, I could also virtualize the backends to some other applications, namely Deluge and MythTV, so that the computers they ran on didn’t need to be on 24/7.  MythTV is a little tricky due to the lack of support for PCI passthrough in VMware, but I could of course use USB tuners.  I could also use a virtual machine as my primary desktop, and use a small, low powered, thin client to access it over VNC or SSH.

I recently looked into the hardware I’d want for such a server and came up with the following:

• Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz CPU
• Intel BOXDG31PR Micro ATX Motherboard
• Kingston 4GB (2×2GB) DDR2-800 Memory
• Seagate 1TB SATA2 Hard Drive
• APEX DM-387 Slim Micro ATX Case

The build would be another slim micro ATX build, similar to Cervantes and have a quad-core CPU, 4GB of ram, and a terabyte of storage.  In total, it came to a little under $600 for the entire build (I love how cheap hardware is getting) but I think I’ve decided to hold out for Nehalem before I build it.  With native quad cores and hyper threading, Nehalem should work well for this kind of project.