Upgrade DAY!

Tomorrow is the day!  Everything seems to be working, so tomorrow I shut down all the server, move some hardware around and bring everything up inside VM’s using VMWare.  The final plan includes setting up the main server with 4 250GB SATA II hard drives setup with RAID5 and a hot spare, which gives us 500GB of storage space.  I’ve split up this storage into several VM’s.  There will be one VM acting as our PDC using Samba and LDAP, and another as a BDC.  There will be a VM running as a LAMP server (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) that will host a few open source programs we use.  Then there will be another VM running Nagios to monitor all the server, switches and printers.  Then there will be a second server with a removeable SATAII hard drive bay, and I will use two 500GB SATAII hard drives.  I will copy the RAID array from Server1 to the removeable hard drive in Server2 using dd and iSCSI over a direct Gigabit connection between the two servers.  The removable hard drive not in Server2 will be stored offsite and they will be switched daily.  With the RAID5 we could lose up to 2 hard drives in Server1 and still keep working without losing any data.  If Server1 has some other hardware failure, I can start the VM’s on Server2 from the removable hard drive and run off that until the hardware failure is taken care of.  If there is some sort of catastrophe that results in both servers becoming non-functional, I can stick the SATAII hard drive that was stored off-site in any computer I can come up with that has a SATA port and run off that.

The end result will be better disaster recovery.  I hope to automate as much of this as I can, setting up a heartbeat monitor between the two servers and making a script to run if one server fails.  In conjunction with Nagios I should stay informed of any problems that come up, and hopefully correct them before the users even notice.

Well, that’s the plan, I’ll let you know how it ends up.