1. New Virtualization Host

Now that we are using KernelVirtualMachine, getting systems into use without weeks or months of delay is finally feasible. We're making good strides toward getting rid of mire, and now the time has come to allow deleuze to retire as well. Unfortunately, fritz is effectively at capacity with the web server and member shell vms, so we need a new machine.

The immediate uses for the new machine:

• Base system as a pure KernelVirtualMachine host

• Immediate migration of Navajos and Bog to a more powerful machine (i.e. tons of breathing room, everyone can run dynamic servers!)

Over the next few months other uses appear:

• VM for misc services and admin tasks (dns, domtool-server, the place where admins build software)
• VM for mail services
• VM for secondary KDC and openafs file server (probably a good idea to split user and mail volumes across the machines)
• VMs for Debian Wheezy versions of navajos and bog

This means we need hardware featuring something like:

• 8+ cores
• At least 32G RAM
• Room to add more drives
• Space for a number of VMs
• Space for afs storage
• Space for on-site staging of backups

1.1. Possible Hardware

Find a price quote, and list any machines you think would suit the task.

1.1.1. Power Edge R515

• Up to 12 3.5" hot swap SATA drives (think of the possibilities)
• Dual 6-core Opteron 4170HE (2.1GHz)
• 32G RAM (4x8G Low voltage 1333MHz)
• Fancy sliding rails, no cable management arm
• Non-redundant power supply
• Only BMC

• On 2013-01-20, $2413: pe-515.pdf

• On 2014-07-05: $2630 pe-515_2013-07.pdf, but with redundant power supplies and 2x8-core and 1600Mhz RAM

2. Backup Drives

As feared, it turns out that we cannot do an afs volume dump to the afs volume partition of the fileserver without grinding hcoop to a halt. ClintonEbadi's early test resulted in fritz thrashing itself into oblivion, and the entire site losing access to the fileserver (never fear! services recovered flawlessly on their own mere minutes after killing the dump). Neither deleuze nor mire nor hopper have the free space required for backing up all of the data we have in afs now, never mind future data.

Thus: we need a pair of drives for a third RAID1 on fritz or the new machine, dedicated to backups. We have nearly 200G in data that needs backing up now, so 500G is the absolute minimum. However, much larger drives are not much more expensive and it's not unrealistic that we would have well over 500G of data in need of backing up 18 months from now (inserting new stuff at the data center is a pain).

2.1. Drive Options

We have caddies for all six bays in FritzInfo plus an extra so we can get anything.

3. OpenAFS Drives

We're only using a bit under 200G of data now, and have a 1TB partition on fritz for afs. So we probably only need another RAID1 of 1TB disks, although we should investigate larger drives to make sure we hit the optimal price/GB vs predicated needs.