For all of us that run our own home labs we know (or should know) the price of what it costs us to run our equipment every month. Previously I spent some time with a Kill-A-Watt meter performing an energy audit on my equipment and found that it uses about 650 watt/hrs of power. At 12 cents per kwh I’m spending $78/month on my lab, over $900/year. 60% of our monthly electric bill goes towards my work hobby.
I’ve tried to slim some servers down by moving them to a laptop running Debian & VMware Server but there are creep-cpu-usage problems involved with that. The laptop running VMware Server wasn’t all the beefy either, a Athlon 2800+ with 512mb of RAM. 1 or 2 guest OSs before things start to slow down. No RAID setup, no firewire, no expandability; a good stop-gap system until I could figure out what I wanted to do.
Through a lot of reading I’ve decided that an VMware ESXi system was the way to go if I wanted to virtualize my servers and have enough room left over to delve into Cisco Call-Managers, IDS/IPS systems, Nessus scanners, Asterisk, Olive’s, and just stand alone systems for trying new things. I also needed a NAS to centralize all the usb/firewire drives that I have laying about. The NAS needed to have RAID capabilities and act as an iSCSI target so I’ve chosen to go with FreeNAS. Read more…
One of the steps I needed to take to virtualize servers was to setup vlan trunking between a Linux server and my switch and then have VMware Server bridge to those vlan interfaces.
Here are the steps involved:
Read more…
While in the process of pre-staging a consolidation of my servers to one hefty VMware server( instead of multiple machines idling at 80 to 250 watts each) I realized that I could begin the building, patching and installing process on my laptop because one of the coolest features of VMware is that you can move the guest OS from computer to computer and power them up, they never know the difference.
In starting the build process I ran into a snag with Debian Lenny. The symlinked gcc version is 4.3 and VMware Tools was complaining that since the kernel was compiled with 4.1, I should use that instead. It suggested I create a variable and assign it the path to gcc-4.1. Ran into some problems doing this and eventually discovered that sudo strips most environmental variables before it executes the program you want to run. So the variable ‘CC’ was getting removed before the vmware tools script was run.
Work arounds
- Include changing the symlink for /usr/bin/gcc to /usr/bin/gcc-4.1 for the build process and then back to 4.2 (Quick Fix)
- Going into root to add the variable and then installing the (Easiest)
- Adding ‘CC’ to the allowable variables in sudo and/or disabling ‘env_reset’ in the options (Opens potential holes for users to exploit).
I also found that a lot of people were having the same issue as me and posted a reply on another blog about what I found
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