Friday, July 8, 2016

Another Summer Another Consolidation

It’s been a very busy few months. The main change is the arrival of our second boy William. Work was very busy as we migrated from a physical data center to a virtual one. And at home, I migrated from running 3 servers to 1 giant one. Okay, one giant one plus a NAS. Main reason is the energy cost. Running extra servers for VMs that are sporadically used just isn’t worth it. I might at some point move them to the cloud entirely and let someone else pay for the electricity costs. I’m constantly bouncing back and forth between running the services myself and putting them into the cloud. I guess I prefer my privacy with my own hardware. That’s one of the big reasons why I went with a Synology NAS. I really like the redundancy and I’m using a cloud backup service to go with it.

One thing I noticed about moving all those VMs into one server is that all those VMs still depend on disk IO. And I can see that my VM which has lots of cpu power is constantly showing that there’s a lot of load because it is waiting for my RAID disks. So I bought a 1TB EVO SSD for my VMs. Now, there’s NO iowait! Whoo hoo, I don’t have to worry about how many VMs I run anymore on my 6-core server.