architecting your data center (version 2)

sometime around 2007 or 2008 i suddenly had about 200 physical servers dumped in my lap and i had to come up with a complete software infrastructure for these servers. i had to design, implement and maintain them by myself with minimal aid from others.

in this article i wrote down the applications i used back then.

and now with the success of another article of mine talking about building a nested esx lab at home, i decided to see what i could do for a full fledged openstack environment and to document it.

currently my thoughts on the applications required are as follows

documentation

i intend to document each component's build out and integration with the other components as i go along.

software

also, just a reminder that i intend to use only open source software where available. note that initially I will be going for standalone servers, and hopefully circle back to reimplement these servers with HA

hardware

as for hardware, i want to minimise the budget which means for applications like alerting i am still up in the air on purchasing the necessary hardware and gsm sim card or subscribing to a service on the internet which will do it for me. it might come down to spending $40 or $50 for the hardware vs $5 for a single month's subscription.

fyi, i already own several desktops that could be repurposed for this endeavour. i certainly do not intend to purchase any more. the rdo-manager documentation talks about needing a minimum of 3 physical servers so that should be doable.

implementation

as to the order of the installation, i havent quite decided yet. obviously openstack will be first. a question that i need to answer will be how much of this infrastructure will be physical and how much will be virtual. i dont want to fall into a chicken and egg situation and find out that its actually yogurt that i have to look at. yogurt requires that you import a culture from a previous batch. you'd be surprised at what some entreprises have done to bootstrap their environment and i don't want to fall into the same trap.

going forward

so keep watching, keep coming back, give me ideas, and help me build this virtual datacenter

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