Enter Proxmox VE.  It utilizes KVM (Kernel-base Virtual Machine), which was developed by Red Hat and is included in the Linux kernel.  All nodes can be centrally managed from a web browser, and live migration is included.  It is a breeze to install.  Just download the iso file, burn a CD, boot and install on each node.  Proxmox runs on top of Debian Linux. One interesting twist is that Proxmox VE can run both fully virtualized KVM images or OpenVZ templates on the same host.  More importantly, it’s free!  However, commercial support is available when you need it.  Unlike some open source products, there’s not a crippled free version and a fully-featured premium version.  Furthermore, quite a bit of documentation and video tutorials are available.  I encourage you to give it a test drive and donate to Proxmox if you like it.

Further reading:
Proxmox: The Ultimate Hypervisor
Proxmox: The high-performance virtualization for the rest of us

Think Inside the Box

In most data centers, compute services and storage services reside on separate hardware. Storage area networks (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) allow storage resources to be pooled, resulting in efficient storage utilization.  Dedicated storage servers often have snapshot, replication, and deduplication capabilities as well as redundant power, RAID controllers, and hot-swap drives.  However, pooling of storage can also create bottlenecks between applications and data. Furthermore, virtualization can create network bottlenecks due to server consolidation. The way around these bottlenecks has been to use faster interconnects such as 10 gigabit Ethernet (10GbE), Infiniband, or Fiber Channel.  These technologies can be very expensive. For instance, a 48-port level 3 gigabit switch might cost $2000, whereas a 48-port 10GbE level 3 switch costs around $30,000.  By avoiding expensive interconnect hardware, more is available to spend on SSD drives or additional RAM to increase performance.  While combining compute and storage services inside the same box may appear to be going backwards in terms of using local storage, there’s one important difference now: virtualization. Virtualization allows storage software to co-exist on the same server as virtual machines. This can be achieved by using PCI Pass Through with Vmware or Xenserver along with storage appliance software such as NexentaStor. Another approach is to use an Illumos/OpenSolaris derived OS like SmartOS which combines KVM for virtualization with ZFS as the underlying storage.  Within the same box, speed of access between compute and storage services equals or exceeds going outside the box at a much reduced cost. Virtualization combined with today’s increased cpu, memory, and storage densities makes it possible to build a “datacenter in a box” that is capable of handling the requirements of many small to medium-sized businesses.

Virtualization

One of the big selling points of virtualization is that it allows for consolidation of servers and therefore reduced capital and operating costs.   Virtualization can also reduce costs by saving time and reducing risk as follows:

• Virtual machine images are stored as files allowing them to be easily backed up, restored, migrated, cloned, replicated, or compressed.
• Virtual machines present standardized hardware to the guest OS regardless of the underlying physical hardware.  Therefore, restoring to different hardware is quick and doesn’t require loading new drivers.
• Allocating virtual hardware such as cpus, memory, nics, and storage can be done on the fly without having to physically open up a server.
• An entire virtual infrastructure can be built including servers, firewalls, routers, and switches in a much shorter time than it would take to build an equivalent physical infrastructure.

Open Source

This may be stating the obvious, but for many services such as web hosting, firewall, DNS and ftp, open source options are often more stable than their proprietary counterparts. They are also cheaper, as in free, if you are willing to learn a bit about their implementation.  If not, many companies offer commercial support which still provides significant savings over proprietary options.  Here’s a small sampling of some of the open source software we use here at Fulcrum21:  Proxmox VE, Ubuntu Linux, CentOS, Illumos, Virtualbox, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), X2go, Putty, Libre Office, Open Office, Thunderbird, and many more.

Ebay

Ebay sellers are great for offering hardware at attractive discounts, but you have to know the market to be sure you’re getting a deal, so do your research.  Whereas Google, Microsoft, and Facebook standardize on specific hardware, virtualization provides a way to get around this.  Within the same cpu family, virtual machines of the same version appear to be running on the same hardware regardless of the actual underlying physical hardware. Therefore, it is possible to purchase a batch of servers from Ebay based on the best price rather than trying to match the previous brand or model. Other hardware such as switches, routers, etc. can be found at significant discounts too, as well as just about anything related to computing.

Since then, Microsoft has revealed a similar hardware strategy (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/04/25/microsoft-reveals-its-specialty-servers-racks) as well as Facebook with its promotion of “vanity free” servers through the Open Compute Project (http://opencompute.org/). Cloud based infrastructure on the scale of Google, Microsoft, or Facebook has resulted in new strategies for reducing infrastructure costs while maintaining reliability.  What strategies are available for smaller scale infrastructures?  This will be the subject of Part 2.