Home Lab Rebuild

Recently a hard drive went out on my main home VM Server. It was in a RAID, so there was no data loss. But as I had to shut everything down to replace hardware (no hot swap…), it makes me think about also maintaining the software stack for the lab.

Currently I have two physical systems that are libvirt/KVM hosts for my virtual machines, including the main firewall and fileserver. I’ve had my eye on a few newer technologies, so the lab layout requires maximum flexibility. With that in mind, here is the brief plan for the rebuild:

• Continue to be based on Ubuntu 14.04 and a Libvirt/KVM setup. This provide the most flexibility for layering on other technologies, as configuring unique network setups might be difficult with other systems. For instance, having the ability to use a tethered smartphone for the whole network in the event the main Internet connection goes down.
• Explore other VM management systems by taking advantage of KVM nested virtualization.. This would include OpenStack, oVirt, and perhaps VMWare.
• Explore OpenVSwitch for software defined networking (SDN). Currently I have a managed switch and tag network traffic at the host layer. It would be nice to explore systems that give me the same ability to separate traffic, but only require dumb (and cheap) unmanaged switches.
• Explore Ceph for distributed storage (vSAN). Instead of using a traditional software RAID or external NAS/SAN for redundancy, utilize Ceph to distribute entire VMs across machines for redundancy.
• Automate the entire setup with Salt. I’ve had experience with Puppet and Ansible, but would like to more deeply explore Salt. I like the idea of everything being Yaml, and a consistent Jinja2 templating interface for all files.

Obviously a lot of work, but this will be spread out over time. At this point I’m still making sure the base environment is configured correctly, and will then begin taking each of these items one at a time. Exciting times ahead…