After years of moving my sites between providers and piggybacking off other companies' servers, I finally bit the bullet and collected enough parts of a machine four years ago to put together my own box to be co-located in a client's rack.
It's certainly not the fastest of machines now or even then, sporting a single Intel Pentium 4 CPU running at 2.4GHz with 1G RAM. I wanted as much reliability as I could muster on my budget (very little), so I did opt for dual 160Gb hard drives in a software RAID1 configuration.
Over the four years it's been hosted, it's run email for my domains, websites for me and a few friends and it hosts a helpful http proxy, useful for bypassing those pesky corporate firewalls. More recently, it's been running my home phone system too, providing features like a 'follow-me' number and cheap international calling. In all that time I've only had one incident bad enough to warrant a rebuild (which was wanted anyway, just not at that exact moment).
But times change and technology marches on. I decided earlier this year I wanted to switch out the hardware to something more modern and – key – I wanted separation of services into different 'machines'; if someone messes up their website installation, I don't wish to risk losing my phone system. Virtualization was needed.
The server – a HP Proliant ML115 – was recommended by a number of friends as a low-price server which is powerful enough to do virtualization. It comes with a quad-core processor and bumping it up to 4G RAM was no problem at all.
Over the last few weeks I've been configuring this machine to run the Xen Hypervisor, the 'powerful open source industry standard for virtualization, [which] offers a powerful, efficient, and secure feature set for virtualization of x86, x86_64, IA64, ARM, and other CPU architectures.'
One of my friends, telecoms guru Dan Lane helpfully provided a cheat-sheet for the Domain 0 installation and from there the guest operating systems. Before long I was creating and destroying virtual machines like a mad-man!
Today I finished the configuration. I've opted for three virtual machines, all running Debian 5.0 (Lenny): one to run websites, one for my phone system and lastly, one as a mail server. Final checks have all been successful so on one of the coming weekends I'll be heading to Aldgate East, server under arm, to replace the machine you're reading this from. The switch-over should be painless – unplug the old machine, plug in the new one and restore data from the previous night's backup. Well, that's the theory, anyway.
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