Going virtual

(Well... At least I'm about to try to)

There is a "long" weekend ahead of me (public holiday on Monday), so I decided to try and go ahead with a plan that was brewing in my head for some time now.

I will try to deploy virtualization in my home network and convert my physical server to the virtual environment. I decided to go with the free ESXi hypervizor from VMWare that I will install on the physical PC in my network. There however are few possibly huge sinkholes waiting to render this plan doomed.

The first issue is, that the hardware I'm planning to install the hypervizor on is actually exactly the same PC the current server I want to virtualize runs on. It is a Windows PC that I'm running my Web, SQL, File, FTP, e-mail servers on for my home network as well as for my public domain (mail server). So I need to convert the running server to virtual machine before I will be able to install ESXi on the physical PC.

For that however, I will need another ESXi server that is already running in my network so I can run a converter utility that will do exactly that. And since I do not have any spare PC with enough resources for this task, I decided to use my network rendering node for that.

At the moment the conversion process is already running and it seems that if all goes well, then it will take some 4 more hours to finish. If successful, then I will be able to shutdown the physical server and start the services on the new virtual clone. If the clone will run fine for some time, then I will erase the physical server and install the ESXi virtualization environment on it and move the virtual server to it.

Once that is done, I will be able to revert my network rendering node to its original purpose (put back GPUs and original drives etc.).

The good thing is, that if this plan succeeds, then I will be able to move some other Linux based servers I'm now running as virtual servers inside of my QNAP NAS to the new ESXi which will have VLAN support the QNAP is still lacking and which I need for network segmentation and security reasons. Also, I will be able to run those systems with more hardware resources that they have available on the QNAP.

Bad thing is that until this migration process is finished (one way or the other - successfully or with me failing and reverting back to the old physical server setup) I won't be able to make any new 3D works as due to my ongoing issues with my main workstation I'm dependent on the rendering power of the network node, which now has its GPUs ripped out.

Well... Time will tell how will this madness play out in the end :)