Building a Home Data Center for Fun and Profit.

A while back, the gentoo-wiki and gentoo-portage websites got yanked off of the net because the ISP got into a dispute with its landlord. This got me wondering if it was possible for a small business owner or hobbyist to build their own data center. So I am starting a project to do just that.

The first step for me is to move my existing servers off of the physical hardware and onto virtual servers. Virtual servers can easily be moved from one physical system to another. As a bonus it is possible to clone a virtual machine to test upgrades before they go into production. Also, none of my present servers use enough I/O, CPU, or RAM to require an independent box.

After a little research, I chose my virtualization software based on my requirements.

I eliminated OpenVZ fairly early. Though most of my servers are Linux based, I occasionally need access to a Windows machine. OpenVZ uses one main kernel to run all of the separate environments, and will not run Windows.

I also eliminated Virtual Box and QEMU. These system seemed to be designed to run on desktops environments. Both have heavy emphasis on the user interface. Neither of them seem to be interested in server cloning or clusters.

KVM was eliminated because of my hardware. KVM requires the Intel VT or AMD-V, and some of my machines don't have it. Since I don't have the money to replace these machines, I can't use KVM.

VMWare was eliminated for the same reason that KVM was. Though VMWare will run on machines without Intel VT or AMD-V, it will not run a 64 bit OS. VMWare is limited to using 32 bit OSes if it does not have the hardware support.

This left me with Xen. It will run 64 bit OS as long as that OS is built for paravirtualization. It will limit which machines will run Windows, but I don't see that as a problem. It supports server cloning, and allows servers to be moved to different physical machines.

So my first step is to move JeBas.us off of its present server, and onto a Xen virtual machine.