I currently have a i7 NUC (4c/4t, 32 GB DDR4) running 4 production VMs on the free ESXi 6.5 and a number of dev VMs that I spin up as required. I’m running out of threads and looking to migrate to Linux as a platform.
The VMs I’m currently hosting are:
- Windows 7 running as an iTunes Server for the WAF to download movies from iTunes to our FreeNAS for viewing on Apple TV (Don’t ask, Yes, I have Plex, No I cant get her to use it)
- Zabbix Server
- MineCraft Server for kids
- PiHole server
I also have a LAMP server running 4 Wordpress sites on a dual-core Atom box I’ve been meaning to move over.
I’ve setup a Gigabyte B450 mATX motherboard with a 2700 and 32GB DDR4-3200 and a 512GB NVMe SSD and a couple of 250GB Samsung EVO 850 SSDs for now and am planning on adding another 32GB DDR4-3200 shortly.
I have Ubuntu 18.0.4.2 LTS Server installed currently as I’m somewhat familiar with that and I’ve been doing some research into Qemu/KVM and would like suggestions on provisioning the base OS and which tools for provisioning the VMs.
I realize this can be almost as a fundamentally religious question as “What’s the best Distro?” but I would just like some suggestions for those who’ve been down this Rabbit Hole based on the pitfalls they’ve encountered and solutions that worked.
I’m thinking run the Base OS off a separate partition on one of the SSDs and save the NVMe for the VMs and use the SSDs also for ISO images/snapshots/templates - advice on partitioning the base OS and where best to run it off of?
Thoughts on Kimchi and other front-ends? Ideally I’d like to run this headless so a GUI on HTTPS is appealing but I’m comfortable in CLIs and spend most of my time at work in them.
Networking support - Open vSwitch? I work in networking and so my home network is already segmented into Guest/Family/Prod/Dev/DMZ so I have a lot of VLANs flying around. I’m thinking if I do move the DMZ LAMP servers I might want to consolidate to one instance of a SQL server on a private network to the client hosts and use that for Zabbix to.
Oh, and from what I’ve read it’s likely technically feasible to migrate the VMs it is likely easier to to rebuild.