[ahimsa-tech] New virtual server box (ahimsa)

[jeff moe]

For quite some time I have wanted to move various dynamic sites from 
ahimsa-web1 (866Mhz) to ahimsa-web3, which is set up with vserver. This hasn't 
happened yet, but "should". The problem now is that ahimsa-web3 has plenty to 
do already. So what I'm thinking of is getting a new box for virtual serving.

There are a number of virtual server techniques, some of which can be combined. 
It'll use xen, vserver, or OpenVT (least likely). I don't have experience with 
xen yet, but it has some nice features that aren't in vserver. Does anyone out 
there have suggestions on which would be most appropriate for an IMC server? I 
think most imc-techs have vserver experience, so that's a big plus from the 
get-go, but that's just a hunch. It seems like xen may be more secure (which is 
a big plus), but less resource efficient. Also, do the new virtualization 
extensions in the new CPUs offer any benefit with vserver? I understand that 
they do for Xen.

Another issue I'd like to solve is the disks. I was thinking of having the 
dynamic sites use local disks instead of NFS. This will offload some pressure 
from the NFS server (doing interminable `rsyncs`) and should make everything 
faster overall. Backups can be made to the NFS server periodically too. The 
issue here is space.

I ran a `du` of everything back in May--it should still be a "reasonable" 
guideline (mir and sites under 1G not included):

186G    custom/images
  44G     sf-active/italy
  32G     sf-active/argentina
  31G     custom/nimiq
   9.1G  dada/barcelona
   6.1G  custom/docs
   3.2G  dada/wmass
   3.2G  custom/radio-uk
   2.1G  sf-active/uruguay
   2.1G  dada/colorado
   1.7G  spip/nantes
   1.4G  spip/nice
   1.2G  sf-active/marseille
   1.2G  sf-active/liege
   1.1G  custom/rt


The total `du` was like 331 gigs. Of this, a huge chunk is /imc/custom/images. 
I /think/ this is just old archive data, but I'm not certain--in other words, 
it wouldn't have to be on the local disk.  I'd like to know because it has a 
big impact on the estimate of how much space we need. Barcelona, argentina, & 
docs are just backups. We could always mix & match a bit too (some parts on 
NFS, some locally--especially "new" data writes).

The box will likely be from penguincomputing or supermicro. The time line is: 
wait for feedback, get the thing (2-3 weeks), bame has offered to physically 
install it, I'll do OS install + OS configuration, then the actual moving of 
sites. I'm looking for volunteers who know each code base to help with those 
respective moves. The distro will be debian etch.

Thanks for any feedback.

-Jeff