Cool Things to do With a Virtualized Server (Or Two)

[ProdigyzMined]

So I have two servers: A Dell PowerEdge R210 and a PowerEdge R210ii. both have 12 GB of ECC memory, but "Sheila" (the R210) has a 4 thread Xeon and 3TB of storage while "Marvin" (the R210ii) has an 8 thread Xeon with 5TB of storage. I've got Sheila running a Windows VM hosting a Minecraft server as well as an Ubuntu VM running a Plex server while Marvin only has a FreeNAS node at the moment. What other things can I do? I know that's super vague, but toss me some ideas. I'm familiar with Seafile, which is basically a self hosted Dropbox, but have never successfully set it up. I'm really just looking for something to do with these things lol. Thanks in advance!

[kittycannon]

11 minutes ago, ProdigyzMined said:

So I have two servers: A Dell PowerEdge R210 and a PowerEdge R210ii. both have 12 GB of ECC memory, but "Sheila" (the R210) has a 4 thread Xeon and 3TB of storage while "Marvin" (the R210ii) has an 8 thread Xeon with 5TB of storage. I've got Sheila running a Windows VM hosting a Minecraft server as well as an Ubuntu VM running a Plex server while Marvin only has a FreeNAS node at the moment. What other things can I do? I know that's super vague, but toss me some ideas. I'm familiar with Seafile, which is basically a self hosted Dropbox, but have never successfully set it up. I'm really just looking for something to do with these things lol. Thanks in advance!

Get people to pay you for hosting their servers for their games.

[vorticalbox]

dns or email? Tor relay I would void running an exit node. Could run a web server and create or learn to make web applications. Make a proxy or vpn.

[ProdigyzMined]

1 minute ago, kittycannon said:

Get people to pay you for hosting their servers for their games.

good in theory except these don't have public ip's: they're in my house and share a public ip with everything on my home network lol

[ProdigyzMined]

1 minute ago, vorticalbox said:

dns or email? Tor relay I would void running an exit node. Could run a web server and create or learn to make web applications. Make a proxy or vpn.

oooh, VPN. I'll look into that

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

you could mine for maidsafe coins when ever there released https://maidsafe.net/

you could also host a own cloud https://owncloud.org/

host your self a nas/media server http://www.freenas.org/

set up a backup of your main computers on to them

set up a automatic video downloading pvr https://sickrage.ca/(supports torrents) http://sickbeard.com/ (only for news groups)

laugh at your freinds for not having servers 

host game servers for your freinds

or my favorite buy all your freinds names as domain names then host porn sites on said domains

[kittycannon]

1 minute ago, ProdigyzMined said:

good in theory except these don't have public ip's: they're in my house and share a public ip with everything on my home network lol

Probably not a good idea then.

[PeachyUwUSenpai]

1 minute ago, ProdigyzMined said:

good in theory except these don't have public ip's: they're in my house and share a public ip with everything on my home network lol

that's fine since only your server ports would probly be forwarded or you could also force that servers connection via proxy with a ip you have port control over which can be purchased cheaply 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Here are some more fun things to do.

 

1 set them up has a ha cluster so you can migrate vm's

 

2. PXE boot server so you don't need usb's anymore.

 

3. Make a windows ad domain for fun

 

 

[Goksha]

All good ideas.

On 11/26/2016 at 11:02 AM, Electronics Wizardy said:

1 set them up has a ha cluster so you can migrate vm's

Sadly, they CPU's are different architectures, and a lot of hypervisors don't like migrating between then. Some CAN do it, but you'd be better off with CPUs from the same family.

You can look at doing some HA systems that don't require migrating between VM Hosts.

[Electronics Wizardy]

33 minutes ago, Goksha said:

All good ideas.

Sadly, they CPU's are different architectures, and a lot of hypervisors don't like migrating between then. Some CAN do it, but you'd be better off with CPUs from the same family.

You can look at doing some HA systems that don't require migrating between VM Hosts.

I can migrate between a xeon e5345, a xeon l5640 and a xeon e3 1231 v3 just fine with kvm(haven't tried the amd system yet). ALl you have to do is set it so the virtulizaed os is older than the oldest cpu.

[Goksha]

I don't have any experience with KVM directly, so I can't comment on it. In my experience, VMware, Hyper-V and Xenserver all have difficulties migrating VMs between different architectures.

[ProdigyzMined]

On 11/29/2016 at 1:23 AM, Goksha said:

I don't have any experience with KVM directly, so I can't comment on it. In my experience, VMware, Hyper-V and Xenserver all have difficulties migrating VMs between different architectures.

 

On 11/29/2016 at 0:12 AM, Electronics Wizardy said:

I can migrate between a xeon e5345, a xeon l5640 and a xeon e3 1231 v3 just fine with kvm(haven't tried the amd system yet). ALl you have to do is set it so the virtulizaed os is older than the oldest cpu.

didn't mention this, but they're using Proxmox as the hypervisor. Unfortunately i messed the domain name up on one of them and haven't been able to cluster the machines (as of yet, if there is a way to do it without losing data)

[Mikensan]

ESXi works just fine with mixed CPUs, you just tell it what level to operate at (lowest of the cores) so it doesn't advertise features that would not be available to migrate to an older CPU. Not ideal, but works fine. I have some VMs setup to use the full features of the more modern CPU (thus it cannot migrate) and other more "critical" ones limited to the older CPU feature set (domain controllers etc..).

 

At first I though Marvin was running FreeNAS purely, not on top of proxmox - had that been the case I would've suggested moving your Plex from Sheila into a jail on Marvin. Hopefully whatever disks FreeNAS has access to you are passing the entire SATA controller over to - unless this is just for testing purposes. I don't know how well Plex will work in a slightly nested environment - but something to do and try :-)

 

With linux KVM, you should be able to pass hardware through pretty easily - so you could create a VM and then connect a monitor keyboard mouse too and have a desktop client to log in to right at the server vs remoting in (exactly what unRaid does, being it is based off of KVM). I think it's really nice to have a way to physically walk up to the server and have a desktop you can interact with to control the box.

 

Also setup a VM of whatever OS you want, install your favorite remote access software (logmein, teamviewer, vnc) and now have a machine on your personal network you can access from anywhere. Lock it down and call it a day. No more remoting in to your personal rig :-)