Pollux is the latest addition to my ever-shrinking stable of machines, and is the first of a two stage process to replace my VM server with a trio of small, lightweight machines to handle my production server duties.

Prior to this month, I had Altair, Polaris, and Vega. Altair was my primary file server with massive internal storage, Polaris was dedicated to “services”, and Vega just kinda sat where ever I could find a hole with power and ethernet.

The Old

Vega’s primary purpose in life was to sit and wait for Altair to hail it during its daily cron run; Altair would shove down whatever file changes took place that day. Basically it was my fail safe if something catastrophic ever happened to Altair that its redundant drives and linux-y goodness couldn’t fix on its own. It also gave me a window in which to go in and yank a file that had been saved over or corrupted.

Polaris was the desktop i redid just a month or so before buying my Mac Pro. The previous parts were aging very badly, fans were dying at an alarming rate and I just wasn’t happy with the performance any more, so i dumped some money into it and beefed it out somewhat. Then when I bought the Pro, it got usurped into being my VM server, hosting 9 VMs across its dual core Athlon and 3GB of RAM. My grand vision was to have each service live in a separate VM, and I more or less succeeded. But the whole box was plagued by the timing issues that all AMD machines suffer from when running VMware, and I got sick of having to maintain all 10 machines (1 host + 9 virtual).

The New

I become interested in Intel’s Atom architecture when i first heard about it a long time ago. The concept of a lower power machine to handle my relatively light weight server duties was very appealing. I haven’t been disappointed. According to my Kill-A-Watt, Pollux sips 35W of power, versus the 180 or so Watts the current Polaris draws when idle. It has more storage in a single drive (500GB) than Polaris does across two (160+250), and the 2GB of RAM is almost as much as what 9 machines were sharing before. And the best part: Total cost of the machine was < $170. The barebones Foxconn case/motherboard combo was $95, plus $23 for a 2GB stick of PQI memory and $49 for a Samsung 5400 RPM 500GB hard drive. Ubuntu 9.04 Server was installed using a bootable USB flash drive, and the network install took all of maybe 15 minutes, i didn't time it. The 500GB drive gives me plenty of space to replace Vega's backup duties, which means that box has been deprecated and shut down. The VM on Polaris running BIND (for local DNS) has been migrated to Pollux and shut down, and Apache is running and doing its thing, though it won't be switched over to production until i get my database server moved.

The Future

Pollux is step one in what I hope will only be a two step process. This was the testing phase, to see if it was viable and what kind of performance I can expect. The next stage will be picking up two more of these boxes. One will be almost a complete twin to Pollux (named Castor, Astronomy buffs rejoice, everybody else go here). It will host a MySQL database, as well as Asterisk, and will have a dual core processor. It will still run Ubuntu Server, have 2GB of RAM and a 500GB drive. Polaris will be the third of the trio, and will be another dual core Atom, with 2GB of RAM, and potentially a 1TB drive. It will be running Windows Server 2008 for all those non-Unixy things that sometimes must be done. I’m hoping to have all this done by Christmas.

Final Thoughts

The experience with Polaris was a mostly positive one. I learned a lot just $^#*ing it up and having to fix it, working through the time problems (basically none of the VMs could keep time, they’d end up days or weeks ahead or behind the actual date/time), and getting a feel for the capabilities of VMWare outside of a true production environment where people would expect, well, results and stuff. At home though, it was really quite overkill and unnecessary. Scaling down to two Ubuntu Server instances and a single Windows Server instance will simplify my management tasks a lot, and removing the giant furnace that is Polaris should help me lower the temperatures in here a bit as well. As I type this its roughly 83º in my office..