Hardware upgrade

This section covers a brief write-up of the hardware upgrade.

Services

It was decided that the provision of services will be kept functionally the same as offered now. The hardware upgrade is not intended to provide any new services, rather to consolidate and update our server provisions as well as add extra redundancy to the services we currently offer.

Server specifications

Two servers of:

Processor	Dual core 2.13Ghz - 2mb L2 cache
RAM	4GB ram
Disk	320Gb (RAID 1 - redundant)

Server Hardware Purchased

Quantity	Model
2	Intel DQ965GFEKR Motherboard
2	Core 2 Duo E6400 (2.13Ghz Dual Core - 2mb cache)
4	2Gb (2X1Gb) Corsair - Lifetime warranty
2	Hardware RAID - XFX Revo 64
2	320 Gb Seagate Barracuda

Thoughts from DrWatson

Are the quantities above correct? You've only ordered two hard drives, and yet you want RAID1 on two servers. I think you need four (Yea, we've got two 320Gb disks already. - Sadiq)

Given current specifications and loads, I'd suggest that just one of those servers could probably do just about everything that Molotov, Twilight, and Bermuda currently do. If that's the case, you may wish to investigate technologies like KVM, VServer, and DRBD. Put pretty much each core service (MySQL, Email, IRC, websites/members, DNS, etc) inside its own virtual machine. If you do it right, you can then get nice redundancy for hardware failure. Of course, bouncing IPs of virtual machines between different physical hosts only works if both servers are on the same subnet.

It also means you keep things nice and logically separated, whilst keeping the hardware nice and consolidated and simple to manage. Were I doing it, I'd suggest that some servers (e.g. email, DNS, etc) might have public IP addresses, and others might have RFC1918 IPs, with nice simple port forwards to the private IP for any public services.