Ask Slashdot: Little Boxes Around the Edge of the Data Center? 320
First time accepted submitter spaceyhackerlady writes "We're looking at some new development, and a big question mark is the little boxes around the edge of the data center — the NTP servers, the monitoring boxes, the stuff that supports and interfaces with the Big Iron that does the real work. The last time I visited a hosting farm I saw shelves of Mac Minis, but that was five years ago. What do people like now for their little support boxes?"
VMs (Score:2, Insightful)
put them in VMs!
bunch of VMs on a box or two (Score:1, Insightful)
Not using a huge collection of physical boxes any more. Just set up a bunch of VM's and leave them to it.
VMs? (Score:1, Insightful)
Why not make one box a VM host and have your various support boxes VMs (except for the ones that NEED to be physical).
Re:VMs (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me old school, but Unix/Linux are multi-tasking. Why not just run multiple services on one OS directly on the metal?
Re:virtualization is the game now (Score:5, Insightful)
Virtualized NTP is about the dumbest thing I've read on /.
Yes, worse than various conspiracy theories and fanboi wars.
Previous gen hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
Last generation's compute nodes. We keep some around for utility functions after decommissioning a large cluster.
Re:virtualization is the game now (Score:5, Insightful)
To be fair, if someone cares enough about time accuracy to understand why that's a dumb idea, they should probably be using a GPS receiver instead of a PC.
performance? (Score:5, Insightful)
NTP server is all about consistency. If it's running in a VM and can be delayed at the whim of the host, do you think it's going to be a very good source of time?
Re:VMs (Score:3, Insightful)
Uhhh. because the "little boxes" and individual servers run on unicorn farts and angel tears?
SOLVED: Little Boxes (Score:5, Insightful)
Answer: VMware VMs.
Re:VMs? (Score:2, Insightful)
Redundancy doesn't mean having different services on separate boxes, it means having the same services in multiple places. In fact it's easier with one VM box hosting everything, because it's easier to keep it backed up and sync'd to a spare then it is to do a whole bunch of individual ones.
Re:SOLVED: Little Boxes (Score:4, Insightful)