Well, it is that time again 🙂
The Binsfeldius Cluster has been running stable on VMWare 6.0 but the current setup is the victim of its own success. I’m running out of memory to place new VM’s. Each node currently has 16Gb of RAM and with the addition of a 5-server-Splunk-backend there is no room for new machines. I even had to turn off the memory-hungry vCenter.
I put in a lot of effort to find a m-ITX board with a good low power CPU and low TDP, at least dual NIC and the possibility to have 64 Gb at a minimum. This has proven to be next to impossible in that formfactor.
So, it’s time for a complete overhaul and make it even more ‘enterprisy’. The only components that I’ll keep are the QNAP TVS-871 which is still epic (even-though it is now discontinued) and the MER switch. I will also still boot from the QNAP ISCSI boot LUNs.
The network will be somewhat different as I’ve changed my infrastructure quite a bit in the past year. The physical hosts are in a separate firewalled VLAN and the VM’s will be deployed in several isolated VLAN’s which have their own segregated (Internet) access.
The Storage Network will be entirely 10Gbit on a separate new switch, a Mikrotik CRS-312-4C+8XG-RM. I purchased a single-port (10Gbase-T) 10GbE network expansion card (QXG-10G1T) for the QNAP.
Another reason to upgrade is that VMWare 6.7 does not support the Core i3 platform anymore.
As before, I’m writing this as I progress through the update of the three node cluster from design, configuration and operation of the cluster. So, the latest entry in the navigation is exactly where I am at.
The index below will allow you to travel the path as I experienced it