I’ve been a bit dormant lately when it comes to my lab. This is due to the fact that I have been away from it most of the summer so I haven’t been able to work on it. A few of my systems are still running as usual, but the bulk of my lab is offline while not in use. But school will be starting soon which means I will be back in my lab! Yay!

New hardware in the lab

I’m excited about some new hardware that’s being added to my lab. At the beginning of summer I picked up a couple of Sun servers: an X4150 and an X4170. I don’t have any plans for the older 4150, but the 4170 has a full compliment of 32GB DDR3 and dual quad core Xeons. I have plans to integrate this one into my OpenStack system as soon as I can find some hard drives for it (prices still suck for 2.5″ SAS drives 🙁 ).

The thing I’m more excited about though is my new Dell R410! I just picked up an R410 with dual quad core processors and 24GB of DDR3. This is my first decent Dell server and thankfully it uses 3.5″ drives so I can use cheaper hard drives. It also has iDRAC 6 enterprise so I’ve been having fun with that as well. I’m not entirely sure if I want to assimilate this into my OpenStack lab or if I want to use it to replace my current production hypervisor. I would like to turn my big 4U system into a storage server for testing with OpenStack, but I may end up using this new server for storage instead of compute.

State of the network

New hardware means it’s time for me to reevaluate my network topology. This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while but haven’t gotten around to yet. I want to change my entire network topology in order to use better subnets and address spaces instead of just using one big address space for all my systems. Getting off of a singular 255.255.0.0 subnet and onto several 255.255.255.0 subnets will help me stay more organized and let me be a little more flexible with my firewall rules so I can better secure my network. I’ve been wanting to isolate my lab network from my home network but that means changing all of my addresses. So I’m just going to do it and get it over with.

It’s kinda hard for me to tear down the network I’ve been working on for two years, but that’s the whole point of a lab. Tearing down and starting over is all part of learning so don’t be afraid to do the same in your own lab. It allows for new opportunities to learn and better solutions to pop up.

goals for the upcoming year

I’m going to try and start doing these kinds of posts multiple times per year to better document my evolving lab as well as better define my goals. This will help me keep my thoughts organized and give me some direction to go with my lab.

So for this state of the lab I’m going to set a few somewhat small goals, but ones that will greatly help my lab.

The first and biggest goal is to restructure my network as I’ve been talking about. This means tearing everything but my OpenStack lab down and starting new (the openstack lab network was a bit more carefully planned and is much smaller than my main lab). To do this I am going to go through each and every system and VM I have and set new IP addresses. Before doing anything though I will thoroughly document each system on the network and plan out my redefined subnets and which addresses to give each system. It’s going to be a task, but it’s been a long time coming.

The next big goal of mine is to set up a storage system in my OpenStack lab. Right now all storage is temporary and I have no way of doing live migrations because there is no shared storage between compute nodes. I want to be able to do both live migrations as well as have persistent storage options in the lab so I can get some experience with those storage systems. This one will be challenging as I really don’t have the extra hardware for a storage system and I don’t want to repurpose any of my existing systems for this task so we’ll see how well this one goes.

I’m going to leave it at those two goals for now. They’re a bit big but I want to be able to achieve them without having to sacrifice other goals to reach them.

That pretty much wraps up this post. I’m anxious to get back in the lab and start working on things again so keep an eye out for upcoming posts!

Catch you next time!