Storage strategy for Amahi

A

arriflex

New Member
Sep 22, 2011
5
0
1
Self proclaimed noob to Proxmox. My goal is a single machine that provides for a voip system such as PIAF, as well as a NAS for Windows and Mac backups. Additionally, I would appreciate the ability to test other servers on it.

Hardware:
HP ProLiant ML110 G6
6gb ram
160gb sda
2000gb sdb

I have installed Proxmox VE 1.9, and setup the fedora-14-standard_14-1 template on a 60gb with 2gb ram as OpenVZ101. The 2tb disk was never formatted or setup and I anticipate adding more to the system with time. I can easily run all my other prospective servers on the 160gb disk.

Ideally I would like for Fedora14, which at this point has Amahi installed on it, to have full access to the 2tb disk. It appears as though bind mount is the way to go for that. Speed is not much concern here, is there a better, more durable way? Should I partition a portion of the 2tb drive to use as backup for the smaller system drive first?

My head is spinning with the possibilities, but I'm not coming up with clear reasons for the various options. I have already also setup a small OpenVZ 102 with centos-5.7-purple1.8.6-piaf_1.7.5.5.5-1_amd64 but may consider changing that out for a different voip solution.

It seems wasteful to have multiple appliances as my throughput needs are very small (basically a backup server and 6 simultaneous lines of voip), but perhaps that is the better solution?

arri
 
arriflex said:
Ideally I would like for Fedora14, which at this point has Amahi installed on it, to have full access to the 2tb disk. It appears as though bind mount is the way to go for that. Speed is not much concern here, is there a better, more durable way? Should I partition a portion of the 2tb drive to use as backup for the smaller system drive first?
Click to expand...

If you want to assign a whole hard drive to a VM then you'll have to do it with the command line, not in the GUI I'm afraid.

Find disk by name first:


cd /dev/disk/by-id
ls


Add physical disk to a VM:
qm set 102 -ide1 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-Maxtor_53073H6_K60GXNMC-part1



Or edit the /etc/qemu-server/102.conf file and add in:
ide1: /dev/disk/by-id/ata-Maxtor_53073H6_K60GXNMC-part1
ide3: /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_AC310200R_WD-WM6750138984


Or experiment with virtio and SCSI to get around the 4 drive limitation of IDE




My head is spinning with the possibilities, but I'm not coming up with clear reasons for the various options. I have already also setup a small OpenVZ 102 with centos-5.7-purple1.8.6-piaf_1.7.5.5.5-1_amd64 but may consider changing that out for a different voip solution.
Click to expand...

I use this OpenVZ template for my VOIP, but I only use it for one line. Is there something not working with PIAF?
 
For some reason the ethernet adapter wasn't configured right with that template. I don't know, I didn't spend much time troubleshooting it, I just installed onto a KVM from the full release ISO instead. Works fine so far.

Regarding the storage solutions, four IDE should not be an issue. However, is there an advantage to having Proxmox manage the storage back to the container? Would I then create a new iSCSI (or whatever is best, I don't really know) that the Fedora/Amahi has access to?

Thank you for your patience.

arri
 
What little I've played around with Amahi, I think I would dedicate a whole hard drive or multiple hard drives to the VM, especially if you are using it under KVM. It makes it easier to setup, and in a complete system failure you can take the physical hard drive and hook it up to another system to preserve data. Dedicating a whole hard drive is easier in terms of simplifying what the VM expects. The VM operating system is expecting to be natively installed on real hardware, so I accommodate that expectation as much as possible to keep the VMs stable and running well.

iSCSI would be ideal as you can share the space with other VMs, but I think it complicates the setup, and if something goes wrong, complicates the troubleshooting. If this VM is just something to play around with... then by all means play with any complicated setup you can think of. But if you are going to be depending on this VM for production... then I wouldn't use iSCSI... at least not for the "core" drives with production needs.
 
Thank you. Those are very much inline with my intuition. The idea of being able to yank a physical disk and recover from it is comforting, adding that extra layer is a little scary. The Amahi VM is less for experimenting than the other VM's.

arri
 
Just out of curiosity, what are you planning on using Amahi for?
 
I've been using it for windows and Mac backups, crashplan, shared folders, hosting a cmms, playing with a wiki, openvpn, etc. Nothing I couldn't do with other servers, just seemed easier at the time to do with Amahi. If my comfort level were a little higher, I'd probably use Ubuntu server instead. It's just really nice to single click an app and have it mostly work. Unfortunately, though, the best part of Amahi I'm missing as I can't use it for my dhcp, so I'm don't get all the easy name routing it does.
 
In looking closer at the qm command, it appears as though that is only applicable to kvm's. The Fedora install I am using is the OpenVZ container available from proxmox. Vzctl seems to be the tool for containers, but I am not finding an equivalent whole disk assignment command similar to the qm one mentioned above. Should I be running Fedora as a kvm?

I am sorry if I caused confusion.

arri
 
arriflex said:
In looking closer at the qm command, it appears as though that is only applicable to kvm's. The Fedora install I am using is the OpenVZ container available from proxmox. Vzctl seems to be the tool for containers, but I am not finding an equivalent whole disk assignment command similar to the qm one mentioned above. Should I be running Fedora as a kvm?
Click to expand...

I haven't played with whole disk assignment with OpenVZ. But it works great with KVM.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom