Hey all,
at the moment I am looking for hardware for a KVM host, but on a few
points I realy have problems to get a good hardware setup.
My situation is the following: I need a server with minimal energy
consumption, the ability of PCI Passtrough (so IOMMU is needed) and good
support for Nested Virtualization (KVM, Xen and VMWare)
So when I understood everything right I need a CPU and chipset on the
board which supports IOMMU, which consumer boards do and which of them
works fine with KVM?
For the nested virtualization theme I read that EPTs in case of Intel
and RVI in case of AMD is needed. Also I read that the AMD RVI would be
better than the EPTs of Intel and bring a good speedup, wikipedia
mentions a VMWare research whitepaper and Red Hat tests
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Virtualization_Indexing). Also it
seems that the implementation of Nested Virualization is easier with the
AMD RVIs than with the Intel EPTs. So which CPU with which chipset
(baord) should i prefer to get this features.
For the RAM I thought about 32GB because my experiences show that
virtualization needs much RAM, would that be a good value for RAM when
the VM host runs a few VMs with simple server services like (HTTP, SMTP
etc.)?
I want to run VMs with much I/O so I'm thinking about the hardware
setup. I want to have a few TB of space so for example 4 3TB hard disks
in RAID5, all virtualization solutions (Xen, VMWare) recommand hardware
RAID. I also would prefer hardware RAID but would software RAID decrease
the I/O performance very much? And would it be a difference to take
software RAID with mdadm (for example on ext4 filesystem) or native RAID
support like in BTRFS?
Which modern hardware RAID controllers would be fully supported by linux
and are there recommandations for a special interface (S-ATA, SAS etc.)?
I don't have that much experiences with KVM-over-IP managment but I want
to start using it. Are there special conditions which must be fulfilled
by the board or operation system? And does someone here have experiences
with KVM-over-IP managment and can recommand adapters or cards?
To say something about the price I targeting: It would be greate to have
costs between 800 and 1400€ for the host system without the costs of the
KVM-over-IP console. When the price would be higher it would be ok when
it don't is greater than 2500€
Best Regards
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