jmak Posted January 21, 2015 Posted January 21, 2015 Hi Just looking for general advice on whether what I am thinking of is possible/sensible or better suggestions. As per title, I am setting up my Microserver (Gen7, N54L) at home. The primary function is to provide a backup for all of our home data. I'd also like it to serve as a test lab for learning (needs to work, performance not critical). I have 2 WD Red HDDs (can't afford more at the minute so RAID5 not an option) and I want to boot from the internal USB - I've bought a Sandisk Extreme 64GB flash drive. My plan is to just run a Hypervisor on the boot drive, partition the WD Reds to have 25% for VM OS's and the rest for data. I was planning to run the 2 HDD's in RAID1 for resilience and back up offsite using crashplan. I was hoping to use Hyper-v server 2012R2 as the hypervisor as that's what I'm going to use at school and I'd like to get familiar with it. It doesn't seem keen to install on the USB - is it worth messing around with the Flash Drive to try and fool Windows into seeing it as a fixed drive or will that just cause pain in the long term? Is running in RAID1 worthwhile or would I be better off using a utility to replicate it or Storage Spaces? The permanent VMs will be flavours of Linux - the test VMs will mostly be variations of Windows (full trials for licensing compliance). Looking forward to the range of opinions! Thanks in advance for all contributions.
jinnantonnixx Posted January 21, 2015 Posted January 21, 2015 (edited) You could use mirroring as you suggest, but another option would be to use one of the disks as a live mount, and the other as a backup. Rsync could keep the disks synced overnight. The advantage of this over mirroring is that you would have an extra buffer should your clients get a cryptolocker virus, you delete stuff by accident, etc. Use crashplan to sync the 'backup' disk. The backup disk would not be visible as a mount to your clients, so would be insulated from accidental deletes, etc. Edited January 21, 2015 by jinnantonnixx 1
Norphy Posted January 21, 2015 Posted January 21, 2015 Hyper-V Server can be run from a USB drive but it's not easy to do: Installing and running Hyper-V from a USB stick - Boot Hyper-V from USB https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/jj733589.aspx
RobD Posted January 21, 2015 Posted January 21, 2015 This may not help but here's what I did: Bought a HP P410 raid card and 4 WD red drives, Created a raid 5 with the drives, Installed esxi 5.5 on a USB drive, Install two servers (via ESXi) for playing with. You could do a hardware raid with the two drives you have and do the same, shoudnt cost you anything really. 1
Oaktech Posted January 21, 2015 Posted January 21, 2015 It's a damn sight easier to use VMware esxi free to do what you're trying to achieve. 1
jmak Posted January 21, 2015 Author Posted January 21, 2015 (edited) You could use mirroring as you suggest, but another option would be to use one of the disks as a live mount, and the other as a backup. Rsync could keep the disks synced overnight. The advantage of this over mirroring is that you would have an extra buffer should your clients get a cryptolocker virus, you delete stuff by accident, etc. Use crashplan to sync the 'backup' disk. The backup disk would not be visible as a mount to your clients, so would be insulated from accidental deletes, etc. Sounds like a better idea - and I don't have to rely on the built in RAID which gets mixed reviews. Hyper-V Server can be run from a USB drive but it's not easy to do: Installing and running Hyper-V from a USB stick - Boot Hyper-V from USB https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/jj733589.aspx I'll probably give this a go at some point - in the mean time, I'll just play with the single live server in school (Probably better to create a VM on my Microserver and add the Hyper-V role...) This may not help but here's what I did: Bought a HP P410 raid card and 4 WD red drives, Created a raid 5 with the drives, Installed esxi 5.5 on a USB drive, Install two servers (via ESXi) for playing with. You could do a hardware raid with the two drives you have and do the same, shoudnt cost you anything really. It's a damn sight easier to use VMware esxi free to do what you're trying to achieve. Looks like esxi is the way forwards Thanks everyone! Edited January 21, 2015 by jmak
Chuckster Posted January 21, 2015 Posted January 21, 2015 Don't bother installing Hyper-V on a USB stick. I did this and my test lab lasted 3 days before the USB died. Tried different manufacturers and all my efforts proved to be useless. ESXi works like a dream on a USB stick/SD card, not Hyper-V. Hyper-V is best installed on HDDs. 1
Ric_ Posted January 21, 2015 Posted January 21, 2015 I have one of those Microservers and run OpenMediaVault on it (off a USB stick) - it has a hacked BIOS to cram more disks in and it's full of WD REDs. It works well as a NAS and media server but I wouldn't dream of trying to use it for VMs - it would be painfully slow and you won't get any kind of productive learning experience from sitting watching a VM load. If you want a test machine, build another box (i5, as much RAM as you can afford and a single fast hard disk) and install XenServer or ESXi. You can always back this up to the NAS and store things like your ISOs and some VMs on it. You'll also be able to stick some stuff on the local disk. You should probably hold out for another disk too... if you start with 3 disks, you can grow your array later which you won't be able to do with just the two disks. 1
DarkenRahl Posted January 21, 2015 Posted January 21, 2015 With the slower original version of this Microserver I installed 16GB ram and a load of 2tb drives and happily ran over 8-9 vms using esxi off a usb stick. I had a couple of 2008 domain controllers and about 3 or 4 more running stuff like SCCM and WSUS at the same time to test. Along with a few clients i turned on as and when i wanted to test them on the domain. Speeds were fine. Now use it for xbmc movie and tv storage. Had issues trying to run 4 additional sandisk SSD drives in an icydock which fitted into the dvd bay but i think that was esxi not playing nicely with them. I recall i had them all working fine when i was testing hyperv on the server before this. Great little servers. 1
bwestlake Posted January 21, 2015 Posted January 21, 2015 If you use VMware esx it won't recognise the micro server raid so you will have to get a raid controller if you want raid 1
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