I’m working on setting up a virtual data center in my apartment. Starting with Parallels, VMWare and free OS’s, I’m going to try to replicate everything needed for core services, as well as storage virtualization before I move into managed clients. My ultimate goal is to have a working setup providing:

• DHCP
• DNS
• LDAP
• Shared Storage
• LAMP
• Mail
• Anti-Virus/Anti-Spam
• Log monitoring

The first part of this is my Fake Thumper project, inspired by a blog posting I sadly can’t find. However, Ben Rockwood covers the finer points for me.

My real interest in ZFS and Solaris is, in essence, to create a shared storage server, running NFS and iSCSI, so I can do further setup and testing – and get free snapshots out of it. Looking into this, I can see why NetApp and Sun are fighting now. I’m a big fan of NetApp storage arrays, but I can’t afford one for testing and development, so I’m going to have to use the tools I have. Of course, I may ditch the whole thing and move over to the Nexenta Systems Storage Appliance VM

I’ll update in a couple of days with a log server setup.