Viktor Hansson

by Viktor Hansson on 09 January 2015, 19:31

Since I started working at Data Ductus I have had to do a lot of server configurations, which has improved my knowledge of networking and linux vastly. These servers are of course virtual machines hosted in a cluster of physical hosts. And after having been exposed to this setup so much now I decided to upgrade my own server configuration. But my needs are not exactly that high so I opted for building a server from scratch, using ordinary desktop pc components to keep the cost at a minimum.

The host I built is hosted(yes pun intended) in a mini-itx case, with a 4-core i3 CPU @3.40 GHz, with 16GB RAM and a 128 GB SSD for the hypervisor OS and some of the most used vms. I have currently installed a 1.5 TB HDD and as soon as I have migrated my current physical server to a vm I plan on fitting the 2 TB HDD from that in the new one.

For the hypervisor part I opted for Arch Linux with qemu using kvm for optimal performance. This together with webvirtmgr makes the vm management fairly painless, although not quite. Currently autostarting vms with the host is not working, due to the bridge interface not being started before the vms are started, so the start fails.

At the moment I only have one vm active, called NAS. My plan is to use this only to host files, nothing else. The server shares each users home folder using the users credentials on both scp + ftp + samba right now, which is very convenient.

EDIT: So I finally managed to get the vms to start, although it is not pretty...

I put a script in /root/start.sh

#!/bin/bash
sleep 20;
systemctl restart libvirtd

and added this in my /etc/netctl/bridge

...
ExecUpPost="/root/start.sh"
...

So while it may not be the best solution, I will probably settle for it since it works at least.