I currently have a home server running 12.04.2, the hardware supports virtualisation and I've already played around with a few options but am stuck with the right approach. I currently have a small mSata SSD for boot only, I also have 4x 2TB HDDs which I create a software RAID10 volume with (mdadm) and then an lvm on-top the RAID. I use the RAID simply as a filestore which is served using samba to my clients primarily for media playback.
I want to preserve the above approach but have several guests running on the host e.g. a guest for VMware Zimbra, another for log capture and analysis etc, primarily though I want to retain the RAID across the 4 disks and to continue serving this as a samba share, likely the other guests on the server won't even need to see/access the samba share as this is really for my clients e.g. media streaming.
I've been reading around about virtualisation to learn basically but I'm stuck with what approach I should be taking...
Would appreciate any advice and/or points about what to search for and read.
Thanks,
K
I want to preserve the above approach but have several guests running on the host e.g. a guest for VMware Zimbra, another for log capture and analysis etc, primarily though I want to retain the RAID across the 4 disks and to continue serving this as a samba share, likely the other guests on the server won't even need to see/access the samba share as this is really for my clients e.g. media streaming.
I've been reading around about virtualisation to learn basically but I'm stuck with what approach I should be taking...
- Have been looking at Xen, even built a Xen 4.3 on my test box and successful got a Dom0 up and running.
- Can I use Xen to dedicate my 4x HDDs to a guest which can run the RAID array and serve using samba?
- Does this require some kind of "Passthrough" support e.g. Intel Vt-d on my CPU and mobo?
- My mobo has RAID built into the EFI (fake raid), should I be re-creating the raid with this to simplify/achieve my goal?
- I've looked at VMware vSphere Hypervisor 5.1 but struggled to find the config/support (likely was searching using incorrect terms?)
- I did see and read up on VMware's DirectPath IO which sounds very much like "Passthrough" with Xen. Still not sure what's limiting me with this however e.g no Vt-d support?
- Finally I've done some reading about the free version of XenServer 6.1, I understand the free version doesn't support any dedication of devices to guests and that I'd need the commercial variant.
Would appreciate any advice and/or points about what to search for and read.
Thanks,
K