The Galactic Empire

  • I figured for my first few posts here I'd show off my system, as I am quite proud of her/it.


    First off, I love OMV. As a longtime Debian admin, OMV fits like a perfectly broken in baseball cap. I first heard of OMV from the WD MyCloud community where I proceeded build like 20 of the 2TB and 4TB models with OMV to give to friends and family this Christmas. NAS my arse, this is a full multipurpose server system, that is just intuitive enough for mid-novices to get up and running, along with being streamlined, simplified, and feature rich enough to keep even the most grizzled grey-bearded veterans coming back for more. It's the most enjoyment I've had with something "new" in quite some time, as I have uses for pretty much each and every feature and plugin. And that's just at home. I'm currently working on a full featured, drop-onsite, all-in-one solution for SMBs utilizing a combination of OMV and the Windows Server 2012 r2 Essentials Experience Pack. I'll elaborate more in another post.


    A little background about myself:
    I'm a male early 30's whom has been working in this industry in one capacity or another since my first job at Mindspring Atlanta when I was 15.
    I have grown with the net as it has grown with me. From my early days scouring the local BBSs looking for "warez" to hosting my own 6-node Wildcat 5 system off an original Compaq Presario (you know, the one that re-dated the original iMac all-in-one concept). My first computer was a Commodore64 with a C128 5 1/4 Floppy and 20mb HDD hacked on to it. I also inherited a TI-99/4A with the LOGO "turtle" and the breakout box that had the massive sized memory modules. I had a Amiga 500 and still have my A1200. I remember installing Slackware Linux from floppy, FreeBSD over dial-up. Ftp.cdrom.com!! Long story short, I've been around and I've seen a lot. I know this post is going to sound egotistical as crap, but in reality, I am simply infatuated and obsessive about technology! I eat, sleep, drink, and breathe it 24/7. Its my life and I am absolutely nothing without it.
    I'm educated, but have no education. I have very little in the way of traditional schooling and certifications, simply a GED, Novell CNE, and MCSE all taking pre-millennium. I have made more mistakes in my personal life than most people will ever get away with, but have managed to forge myself a nice career simply by word-of-mouth and being known for taking insane risks and being completely nonchalant when faced with disasters and sudden doom. I'm eternally confident in my skills and abilities, along with being hopelessly optimistic, these along with my obsessive nature have brought me to where I'm at in my career right now. Somehow I have carved out a niche business in taking on all the P2V migrations that nobody else wants. From the crapton of SCO boxes I'm doing now, to non-existant Linux Distros (anyone else remember Mandrake?) running databases for an entire multi-million dollar business. In doing this, I tend to acquire alot of "throw away" systems and components. And, although my shrink says it's not "real" hoarding, I'm a tech hoarder. If it was made between 1989-Today I've probably got a part that will work.
    Most people don't believe it, but my only PC is a i5 256gb Microsoft Surface Pro 3 that i traded in my 2012 13" MacBook Pro, I do everything I do from that single machine.
    My main purpose in posting this here is not to brag, but to learn. I would love to hear everyone's ideas on just exactly WTF I should be doing with it as opposed to what I am doing with it all. I'd love some constructive criticism.


    First, a few pictures, of what I lovingly refer to as "The Galactic Empire".org
    These were all taken when I was cleaning up my home lab the earlier this week, I'm a bit absent-minded and scatter-brained, so I thrive in what most people would consider an "Uninhabitable Mess"
    I'm currently in the middle of a huge VMWare project for a financial company, virtualizing SCO machines for a DR site using freakin' LTO-4 tapes to load in the backups, so ignore the tape drives.






    I'm just going to dive right in with the specs on the machines and such. In the first picture from top to bottom, left to right.

    MosEisley Cantina -
    Primary OMV NAS/Media Server
    Dell PowerEdge 2950
    2x 3.0ghz Dual Core Xeon 5160
    32gb DDR2-5300 ECC
    6x 4TB WD Red running on a LSI Logic SAS9260-8I in Raid 50 for around 16tb after initialization
    1x 500gb WD MyPassport external USB (OMV's House)

    Coruscant
    - Primary VMware ESXi 5.5 Host
    Dell PowerEdge R410
    2x 2.40GHz Quad Corfe Xeon E5620
    64gb DDR3 1333 ECC
    4x 2TB WD Black 7200 RPM (I also have a few 146gb 15k SAS Drives, and 4x 512gb Samsung 840 EVO for VSAN testing.)


    That covers the DELL side of things, lets move on to the HP side.


    What we have here are 2x HP DL320s Left Hand Solutions SANs which I refer to as OMVSAN02 and OMVSAN01 respectively, top to bottom. Now, I don't consider them even remotely close to what we in the modern day call a SAN, but LHS did some badass stuff back in the day making these lil' monsters crank out some iOPs. Unfortunately for me, I did not receive the licenses nor the passwords for the installed LHS SAN i/Q software. I dicked around with FreeNAS, VMware ESXi, Nexenta, and a myriad of demo "paid" products, but each and every one of them left a bad taste in my mouth. So, finally I said "screw it" and created me 120gb logical drives on each machine and installed OMV. I don't really need iSCSI for "my" purposes, as NFS does just fine. On to the specs.


    DeathStar and DeathStar 2: Electric Boogaloo - Primary shared data housing and Long-Term data storage (More on this later).
    Both machines are nearly identical. The one on top is missing a raid battery but other than that, they are stock.
    2x HP DL320s
    Dual 2.4 Dual-Core Xeon 3060
    8gb PC2-5300 DDR2 ECC
    12x 750gb 7200rpm HDD Raid 6 for fairly close to 7tb each (I know right! But they are pretty fast!)


    And last, but certainly not least:


    The Forest Moon of Endor - Development and Scratch VMware host.
    HP ProLiant DL360 G7
    1x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5606 @ 2.13GHz
    12gb random crap memory that I was somehow able to make work.
    2x 2.5in 300gb 15k SAS drives.
    This is actually the nicest of all my kit, and it's sad that I haven't scrounged up the parts to make it a badass, as it is intended to be the primary VMware host due to the advanced options it has.


    All machines in the house are connected via Cisco SG300 switches with Jumbo Frame (9k MTU). All NICs are teamed and bonded where applicable, on average I get anywhere from 100-130Mb/s transfer rates between wired devices. My main router is a Cisco/Linksys E4200 running Jacky's AdvancedTomato mod of Shibbys TomatoUSB builds. At home I like to keep it simple, so yes there is UPNP and the other "bad" things running. I run a virtual Windows Server 2012 R2 with the Essentials Experience add on, which provides my SSL VPN and various other functions. Other than that, and my OMV box, software-wise everything else is transient.


    The only 2 machines that actually have an OS installed on them are the two DL320s. Everything else is using flash or external media. R410 has a 8gb USB thumb drive in it housing ESXi 5.5, and the HP DL360 has a 4gb SD card with ESXi 5.5 on it. MosEisley runs OMV from an external drive.


    Now, I deliberated not even posting any of this, because I'm not the bragging type. Everything you see except most of the WD Red and Black HDDs was either given to me or rescued from various Enterprise clients. I'd like to put it all to good use, I have pretty decent internet for where I live:
    (Not bad for the central zit on the buttcrack of America.)
    Considering this, I'd like to set-up and develop something free and useful for others, I'm just not creative.....at..........all. Engineering creative solutions to the world's most complex problems, I can do. Drop a bomb in my lap, I'll sort it out. Technical manuals, check! A single original idea of my own? Not a single frackin' one. So, if anyone is interested in assisting, I do have access to a half a rack at a decent Co-Lo facility and there is never and has never been a lack of free/cheap hardware in my life. My roommate heads up a Enterprise/Corporate IT that is now migrating away from having 20 racks of physical machines along with several hundred Unix servers and terminals all over the place, to a simplified VMware + Windows environment that shouldn't take up more than 4-6 racks, including the sans at tape arrays. So they pretty much want to get rid of anything that is going to get in the way. I'm fairly certain neither of these DL320s had been turned on in 2-3 years, the raid battery went out on one of them and they simply migrated the data and shut them off. I even have a box of 15-20 spare drives w/caddies all still in the static bags. Now, to some people this may be normal. I spent the first 15 years of my career working in Non-Profit sector, where you had to at least be a good steward of your organization's finances. Every time I think about moving up to enterprise level engineering, it breaks my heart to know that I may pour my heart and soul (along with the physical abuse of being obsessive) into this solution, only for it to be simply discarded in 2-3 years.
    Hell, I'm rambling. And have been for some time.....

  • I have a nice quiet half-rack coming later this month when I finish un-racking the robotic tape libraries that reside in it. I'm tempted to take a few of those but I really just don't see myself using them.


    I my house is over 100 years old and has had several "odd" additions added to it before I bought it in what has to be the dumbest decision of my life. Don't get me wrong, I love my house as much as life itself. I rented it for 4 years before begging my landlord to let me buy it from him for about $40k more than it was worth. The biggest problem is that it sits on a conventional foundation with hardwood floors....that like to sag during the humid summer months, the room it is in is a window-less "bedroom" that you have to pass-thru to get from the master bedroom to the master bath, so I use it as my office/man-cave. That being said, until I'm ready to invest many thousands of dollars, along with the headaches of having construction workers crawling all over the house for months.
    I'm incredibly limited on space where I could stack something that heavy in a vertical space. It would almost be better if I laid everything out side by side on the floor.
    I do have an absolutely massive attic that I'm thinking about having retrofitted into an office or theater room, in the meantime I was thinking about putting everything up there and running A/C ducts to the rack, but I'm not sure how crazy that really is. but as much time as I spend tinkering and rummaging I need easy access.


    Rambling again....sorry everyone, I used to post online incessantly back 10-12 years ago, this is probably the first message board ive posted to in almost a year. My apologies if I come off like a socially awkward sperglord.

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