My server
I feel like, as my first computer post, I should probably talk a little bit about my setup. My main powerhouse is a HP Proliant ML350 G6:
- 24 GB of ECC DDR3 RAM
- 6-drive RAID bay, 5 drives in use, 2TB effective storage in RAID5
- 2x Intel Xeon X5650 (6 physical cores each with hyperthreading capabilities) clocked at 2.67 GHz
The server is running Proxmox Virtual Environment 5.3 (an open-source, baremetal hypervisor). Proxmox is my go-to solution for virtualization. It is very configurable and easy to use with its web-based interface with REST API support. Proxmox supports 2 types of virtualization: KVM virtualization and LXC Containers. KVM is used to virtualize complete machines for any guest OS, while LXC Containers are more lightweight, though they can only run Linux.
My server is constantly running around 11 KVMs at a time. This website is one of them. Proxmox helps me isolate environments for both convenience and security. If you want to learn more about virtualization, I highly recommend you read this essay I wrote. It’s supposed to be a comprehensible description of what virtualization is and why we use it, aimed at non-tech-savvy individuals.
My laptop
My laptop is a pretty basic HP EliteBook 8570w:
- 8 GB of DDR3 RAM
- 512 GB HDD
- Intel Core i5-3360M (4 physical cores with hyperthreading capabilities) clocked at 2.80 GHz
- NVIDIA Quadro K1000M graphics card
The laptop is running Windows 7. There’s really not much more to say. I use it as a standard workstation with PuTTY to access all of my Linux servers.
My router
Okay so my family rents this garbage router from Frontier, our ISP, and it can’t handle the load of all of my VMs and other devices. So I set up a Raspberry Pi 3 with a USB Realtek Wi-Fi dongle. After several tests, this abomination somehow manages to out-perform our router from Frontier in both speed and stability. Its job is also to monitor the status of my entire infrastructure and detect if anything is malfunctioning. If so, it messages my phone through a service called PushSafer.
The whole thing in review
Everything in my network is interconnected. Maybe I’ll go further into detail in a later post, providing scripts and details as to how exactly everything works. I just wish, for the love of God and all that is holy, that Frontier would put as much work in providing more than 1 Mb (that’s megabit, not megabyte) of internet speed to back my infrastructure.