I have a long term plan to move my email/domain server from Redhat 7.1 to Ubuntu. By long term plan I mean I've been meaning to do it for years and have never quite got round to it...

At the same time I want to move from having two servers in the garage to one server in the house somewhere. I have two servers at the moment because one is an old desktop machine running Redhat for my mail/domains and the other is an old server with a 50GB RAID5 array for my main file share running Windows 2000 Server.

My plan is to take a two step process. First I will build a new machine for it using Ubuntu and software RAID1. That will become my new file server and I'll also run a small Windows server VMWare image on it for some Windows stuff.

In the first instance I'm planning on just virtualising my Redhat machine and running that under VMWare (the Redhat powered server only has 8GB of disc).

In the second stage I'll add a VMWare image also running Ubuntu, which I'll gradually migrate my email/domain to, finally being able to upgrade my anti-spam measures in the process.

I intend to keep the email/domain Ubuntu "server" as virtual going forward. I think will make it far easier to manage, I'll be able to migrate it to new hardware easily, do full backups without hassle etc etc

Does anyone else take this Ubuntu under Ubuntu approach or foresee any problems with it ?

P.S. I've been very lucky with my Redhat setup, it has been in the garage plugging away for about 7 years now, with its single 8GB disk 99% full for most of the last three years. I hardly dare talk about it for fear that I'll anger the Gods of hardware failure and bring the disk read head crashing down.

I use ubuntu (postfix & dovecot) as our mail server at work running in a virtual machine under ubuntu, never skips a beat.

The host machine is a quad core with oodles of ram as it also runs a number of other virtual machines (svn, database and others which I always forget).

I really think you should dump the el-cheapo crap, and shell out for Windows Server 2008 for this task. It will definitely look prettier.

Cheers

If I thought it would be better than Linux at being an IMAP/SMTP/DNS/SMB server then I would...


...I try and use the best tools for any given job. And despite that I still get stuck using iTunes to sync with my iPhone

How about using VMWare ESXi as a bare metal VM, and then run Ubuntu, RedHat and Windows on top of it?

http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/

Have you seen Windows Server 2008 Core edition? It's amazing! It takes the power of a Linux command line, and improves it by starting a full GUI to then display a DOS box in. I could just never get over having a full screen text interface, so Core has won me over.

ESXi is painful to install on a whitebox system. I gave up and installed HyperV Core instead. And then I run Ubuntu inside that.

I had ruled out ESXi because I assumed it complicated things too much, my concerns were hardware compatibility and RAID.

I'll be running it on something unserver-like (either a desktop machine or something Atom based). I'm guessing that none of that will be on VMWare's ESXi compatibility list.

How does software RAID work with ESXi ? I'm guessing each guest just sees a raw chunk of disk that it has to deal with itself ? If that is the case then I'd have to deal with software RAID in each guest and I'd rather have a host OS there to do that. Or have I misunderstood how ESXi operates ?

ESXi would expect the hardware to handle such things as RAID, it is just a hypervisor.

As for VMware's compatible list, not been on it doesn't mean that it won't work, it just means the vendor didn't jump through the hoops. Desktops need not apply and there are ones that ESXi can be installed on, but hardware RAID isn't common on desktops.

Yeah, if you want raid with ESXi you'll want a raid controller that esx can deal with. The whitebox issues aren't too bad if you give up on using the onboard NIC. I just got a Dell Optiplex 760 which with the addition of a intel NIC works just fine so far.

I'll be steering away from ESXi then, as I am looking to move away from hardware RAID.

You pretty much got it. The solution would be to make a separate datastore on each hard disk, that in turn each virtual OS sees as unique drives.

So I suppose a VM on top of an OS makes a bit more sense for your situation.

Thinking out loud here: Could you install OpenFiler as one of the guests, give it direct access to one (or more) of the physical disks, and then use that for RAID, and have it expose volumes to the other guests via iSCSI?

Or does anyone do a hypervisor host that has an iSCSI target built in?