vortexbox virtualization

[spinach]

I'm looking for some guidance. I've been using vortexbox for years and am extremely happy with it. I have yet to upgrade from 1.10 because everything has been working perfectly for me. Recently, a friend gave me an old Core 2 Duo box with lotsa RAM (4 or 8 GBs) which got me thinking about upgrading my vortexbox.

I would like to build a new server with the C2D box I would also like to experiment with virtualization. I have seen the posts by Dan Grewell ( http://www.blisshq.com/music-library...-installation/ ) and Mike Trewell ( http://miketrellosblog.arcadecab.com...-to-openfiler/ ) about installing vortexbox as a virtual machine in Vmware and Esxi but they are both over a year old. I've been leaning toward Esxi because I think I can run it on bare metal but should I be looking at any other options? I like using linux but will always have a windows machine somewhere for my wife. Is bare metal really much faster than installing on a linux os?

What I want to do:

-have various virtual machines running vortexbox, ftp, small website, radio streaming, etc.
-be able to share my vast pool of music between these virtual machines (currently housed under /storage on my vortexbox)
-have a way to backup my music. My vortexbox system currently uses 3 1TB drives (first drive in the actual vortexbox; second drive attached to external usb dock; third drive swapped with the docked drive every month and stored offsite).
-it would also be great to be able to utilize all the spare hard drives I have kicking around to store nonessential files like my movies. My music HAS to be backed up but I don't care about my video files at all. I'm getting close to filling up my 1TB drive so I'd like to gain some headroom by moving my video elsewhere.

[andrew]

Sounds overlly complex. Do you really need all thouse VMs? Why not just run ftp, small website, radio streaming from your VortexBox?

[divreg]

Here is what I would do, and mostly what I have done on my VB.

-Use VortexBox per usual
-Use SFTP to share music with your friends; it's practically automatic through a client's FileZilla, and much better than ftp and vsftpd. All you have to do is open port 22 on your router, add a guest user to your wheel with read only permissions on /storage, and they should be able to connect to your VortexBox on your network and download whatever they want anywhere in the world. Use a good password, or better yet, give them 256 bit rsa keys for ssh. You can run a website through a VM if you really want.
-VortexBox has a backup script implemented already. Use that, or a homebrew method if you've got over 3TiB of data (e.g. a NAS).
-Install VortexBox on the 40 GiB HDD via the Two Disk Install method. Add additional disks to the Logical Volume whenever you need them. Works well with as many drives as your case's HDD cage can handle.

[spinach]

Thanks for the tips. I guess I just wanted to fool around with virtualization but if you think it would complicate things unnecessarily, I'll heed your advice. For some reason, I thought that running each task in a VM would be better in the long run, in terms of upgrading or recovering from a serious issue. Now that I think about it, it's probably not a big deal either way.

[nate1280]

I use VortexBox 2.0 in ESXi, was rather easy to setup. Have it running on an ESXi 4.1 host (1 vCPU, 768 mb ram, 8 GB vmdk), and my music is stored on a physical 2008 R2 server (all my media is stored, and shared via that server). The music path for VortexBox is replaced with the cifs mount to my 2008R2 server, and for tools, I'm using the cert forensics repo to get current open-vm-tools for the 3.3.* kernels. Its also just as easy to compile open-vm-tools provided all the required packages get installed. Actually used the blog post you linked as a starting point (on v1), and just evolved from there (for v2).

Your storage may pose a problem, because you can't just pass a physical disk through to a VM and carry on using it.

But, I agree with andrew it can get needlessly complicated very quickly, especially if you're learning ESXi at the same time. divreg's solution sounds like the best option.

[spinach]

Thanks, Nate. I am going to try divreg's solution this weekend.

Is it possible to install vortexbox to a USB key and boot from there using the Two Disk Install method? How much capacity would the USB key need?

[Tunes]

Thanks, Nate. I am going to try divreg's solution this weekend.

Is it possible to install vortexbox to a USB key and boot from there using the Two Disk Install method? How much capacity would the USB key need?

Spinich,

I believe others have asked for memory-stick-boot and found it is not available on VBA-type hardware.

On an HP N40L micro server, the USB port inside the case with a 16 GB USB memory stick works as a boot drive with the Two Disk Install method. Smaller may also work.

Bruce (Waltonb) has more experience with this setup and may chime in. You could also look up his posts.

-Tunes

[slarty101]

Spinich,

I believe others have asked for memory-stick-boot and found it is not available on VBA-type hardware.

On an HP N40L micro server, the USB port inside the case with a 16 GB USB memory stick works as a boot drive with the Two Disk Install method. Smaller may also work.

Bruce (Waltonb) has more experience with this setup and may chime in. You could also look up his posts.

-Tunes

Hi Tunes,

this is exactly what I would like to do with the slight addition of having the storage on a raid array. I too have a HP N40L and want to install VB onto a usb stick and then use the 4 HD bays to hold 4 2TB drives in a raid 1 array to give ~3.6TB of storage. I've looked at the Howto for installing VB on 2 disks but don't have enough linux knowledge to work out the command(s) or the syntax to create the raid array. Can anyone advise please.

Many thanks,

Sam.

P.S. apologies to Spinach for hijacking his thread.

[gravelld]

An update to my current position on Vortexbox virtualisation (thanks for the reference in the OP)...

With the realisation that I don't need Windows anywhere on my server, I now use KVM (http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Main_Page). I do find virtualising VortexBox is handy, it's very easy to run up a new version, snapshot and go back to a previous version and so on.

My music is served up over NFS by the VM host which the VB mounts to /storage/music/flac. Backup is taken care of with BackupPC.

Perhaps I'll write a new blog post about this...