Carp, one vm machine (master) and one physical machine (secondary)
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hello all…
i figured i'd ask first before spending a lot of time on this concept of a project...
i have been currently converting a bunch of physical machines over to VM on ESXi...
(electricity bill unreal)
so i have everything switched over now dns/apahce/pfsense/POS/etc...
well needless to say putting the gateway on the esxi was nice, but i fell victim to oversight...
after a 9 hour power outage, (battery only lasted 22 mins) i came across a problem... pfsense being a guest on esxi, esxi couldn't get an IP... the rest of the story you can guess... so i have put pfsense back on it's own physical machine...
so what i'm thinking of doing now is this..ESXi server is a poweredge 2950 2x quad 3ghz xeon 32gb ram, with powervault md1000 raid 6 15 krpm
put pfsense back on vm and setup carp and use a physical machine as secondary having network switch/secondary/wan on their own UPS... and the pe2950/md100 on their own UPS....
secondary machine is a dell poweredge sc1425 1x 3ghz xeon 4gb ram with 2x ssd 128gb raid 0
(also to resolve the 22 mintues of battery, i have now installed a 7kw standby propane generator $2500(homodepot)... versus APC UPS setup of $3600 44minutes)
my question is....... will this concept work having the master on VM ESXi and Secondary on physical for a production environment?
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Who starts your generator?
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CorePower 7kW Automatic Home Standby Generator by generac
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Should be good. If it suits your power needs and it cranks reliably, why wouldn't it be good for production environment?
Power is power.Battery + generator is great so long as you can start the generator before the battery dies. Automatic is good.
I use a battery charger, a 3k Watt sinewave inverter, 4 Exide marine batteries for ups and a xantrex auto transfer switch. (Built it myself. The off the shelf stuff was $$$ and didn't have any guts). I am limited to a 3KW continuous load though. At full load it would be an hour, but I probably never have more than 1000W on it.This last a very long time. In the event of very long outages, I plug in the generator, and the xantrex auto transfer switch automatically switches to that.
So long as you have a way to get on from AC to UPS to Backup generator and back to AC without interrupting your power you should be golden.
I'm not really sure what your production environment is though.If things get to be days down, I plug the entire thing into my prius. (I'm not kidding)
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Nice looking generator. I get a little worried about stuff that is mass peddled at Walmart etc places. I cant speak to the reliability of generac stuff, but it looks good. It advertises nice features. Definitely more well packaged compared to my rack-o-batteries/inverter.
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for me the genny is a new item so i can't speak for it yet, one of the things i liked tho was price compared to portable gen (gas), and autostart…
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any how…. lol enough power talk....
along with all the vm stuff..... when i did have pfsense on esxi.... i configured it so everything ran thru a single port with using vlans (wans/lans/etc)... can carp be setup over vlan or do i need to use a actual cable between the esxi and secondary?
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NIC cards are cheap.
However:
http://serverfault.com/questions/353995/is-it-possible-to-assign-a-vlan-to-an-alias-of-network-interface-in-pfsense
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ka, read the link… yeah i'll just add another nic.... lol
Thank you for the info....
i think with the concept of using esxi to host everything on it, dns/gate/dhcp/etc is a great way to reduce longterm costs... only other flaw i have now is future hardware upgrades.... but that can be as simple as moving inventory to another temp host i guess...
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Strange - Most people take great pleasure in doing things the hard way…
I'm surprised. -
lol most everything i have learned is from the hardway… hands on is the only way i say...
play with it, break it, fix it... ;D
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Pretty much.
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why not assign a static IP to the management interface of ESX so that you can always connect to ESX.
then configure your pfsense to boot first in ESX, and add a startup delay on the other VMs so that when they boot pfsense is already up?