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Re: [BackupPC-users] OT: NAS GUI for native Linux (preferably RHEL)
2012-01-12 15:04:30
On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 1:24 PM, Timothy J Massey <tmassey AT obscorp DOT com> wrote:
Timothy J Massey <tmassey AT obscorp DOT com> wrote on
01/12/2012 02:02:32 PM:
> > If your hardware can handle a small amount of overhead
> > and you can manage it from a windows client, you might consider
> > VMware ESXi (the free version). Then you can run a full
GUI console
> > of any OS remotely
>
> That doesn't add a thing for this solution. It's not the "remotely"
> part that I need, it's the GUI part they need.
There are GUI's, remote GUI's and web GUI's. VMware gives you a remote console where you might run a GNOME desktop, etc. Depending on the circumstances, that might be a usable GUI.
And ESXi doesn't
> help a *BIT* in configuring an NFS share...
Right, but it barely hurts.
(Nor does ESXi give
me
> any advantage in managing storage, which is all that this solution
> really is. In fact, there's a reason you really want to run
a VM
> solution on *top* of a really good quality SAN... :) )
A further point on this, seeing as "Use virtualization!"
was a bit of a common reply:
Virtualization puts *really* heavy demands on the
storage layer. ESXi by itself (free or otherwise) provides *very*
little of what you want in that area. It' has *basic* tools, but
it really expects these things to be taken care of by the storage layer
*below* it. (Remember who owns VMware? A little company called
EMC, who might be able to sell you some big iron to help solve those issues...)
And if you do try to use ESXi to do these things,
you're pretty much locked into VMFS, unless you're on a very short list
of high-end storage hardware (i.e. NetApp Filer). In a disaster situation,
do you *really* want all of your backup data locked up in proprietary VMFS-formatted
devices? I don't.
Don't think it really matters, but I like the remote access part - it's like getting a bunch of free remote KVMs and the ability to map NFS-shared iso images as DVDs. I just set up a couple of systems in remote offices where the base system is ESXi and the hardware is 3 raid1 sets. A Centos VM running backuppc owns one whole raid set for the backuppc archive (about 2 TB) plus part of one of the others for an nfs/samba share. Part of the other space is for backup images of live machines that VMware's converter tool can write directly from running machines (and works amazingly well...). I haven't had much of this sort of trouble yet, but I think I can swap any single disk out of that chassis, spin it up in another box running ESXi and access the data, and at the VM filesystem level I can remotely connect an ISO image as the CD, tell the VM bios to boot it, and use any bootable recovery tool. All very handy stuff when the locations are on opposite sides of the continent. And of course it was trivial to clone the setup built in my office to the other locations.
So, no: I do not want virtualization between
my filesystem and my hardware in this case. On a file server: yes,
yes, yes. On a backup server: no.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell AT gmail DOT com
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