So I'm sure that by now all my millions of readers are waiting with bated breath for the details of my new monstrosity. Start off with one of these: 'Biostar MCP6PB M2+ Triple-Core Barebones Kit - Biostar MCP6PB M2+ Motherboard, AMD Phenom X3 8250e, Ultra 2GB DDR2 667MHz RAM, Seagate 1TB LP HDD, PowerUp Black ATX-Mid Tower Case' from tigerdirect.com for $220 (cpu fan extra). Add in a few scrapped knuckles putting it together, and a few skipped heart beats when it wouldn't start up (until I seated the power supply connector better), and viola! I had a fully functioning computer with a BIOS configuration screen.
Next, time to put on some software. Thanks to the wonderful people at Ubuntu I can download a great CD installable OS for the price of the patience to wait for the download and burn a CD. Installation went without a hitch, and soon I had a command prompt from the newest member of my computer stable 'phantom'.
So what did I spend the great fortune and vast amount of time for? The buzz words virtualization and cloud computing keep popping up, so I had to make sure I wasn't missing out on anything important. I know that Ubuntu 10 server edition had both virtualization and cloud computing built in, but I didn't have a spare computer that was capable of running these new advanced features. So I went on a search for a bare-bones kit, and found a nice multi-core computer kit for less than $250, that had a nice fat 1T hard drive to boot (which I may use in a virtual NAS appliance).
My goal here is to pull all the 'mission-critical' services off of my current server 'pal'. That would include mail and my development build machine/server. Once I put these servers into a 'virtual appliance', I can move them between pal and phantom as needed. I can also upgrade or reconfigure these servers as needed, and if (when) something goes wrong, I can restore the old virtual machine in a matter of minutes.
To configure a virtual machine, I followed these instructions and pretty soon had my first virtual machine, 'cloudy'. The same Ubuntu 10 server install disk was used to install the system onto cloudy. Now the first problem, how to connect to the terminal. The virtual terminal packages all required a GUI, which I didn't install on phantom. So I install the virtual manager package on pal, and after struggling with the command line format, was finally able to connect to phantom, and then open a virtual terminal to cloudy. Cloudy had the familiar ubuntu install screen, and I ran through the prompts to install a LAMP server. Once it was installed, I got a command prompt, from which I set up a static IP address. From there I simply used ssh to do the rest of the configuration.
In my next post I will describe installing my second virtual machine and the disaster with the *.img files.
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