Overview
This project area documents the decisions involved in preparing and assessing servers for virtualization and storage experiments. It covers hardware checks, storage controllers, networking and the practical trade-offs between capacity, redundancy, performance and power use.
Hardware exploration
- Dell PowerEdge R610 and R630 systems examined as candidates for a multipurpose virtualization lab.
- Hardware diagnostics covering BIOS, CPU virtualization support, disk arrays and controller health.
- Ubuntu command-line tools used to inspect networking, file systems and service readiness.
Storage and reliability
RAID can help a system tolerate certain disk failures, but it does not replace backups. Controller condition, cache protection, rebuild state and the intended workload all matter when choosing an array. Diagnostics are observations at a point in time, not a permanent guarantee.
Virtualization roadmap
- Compare a dedicated hypervisor against virtualization on a general-purpose Linux host.
- Check hardware compatibility, storage design and recovery options before rebuilding systems.
- Evaluate network layout, management access and capacity without claiming high availability before it has been implemented and tested.
What this project teaches
Good infrastructure decisions start with verified constraints. A plan can change as hardware behavior, power consumption or thermal conditions become better understood. This page describes assessment and planning rather than claiming a finished cluster.