Populate my Server with Airtime Instances

breakingesxi · Jan 10, 2015, 7:59 PM

Okay, here's what I'm trying to accomplish:

I want to setup a community that offers a free radio broadcasting package. It'll have forums, chat, and guides plus services to broadcast your own station.

Here is the gear I have:

uverse 45/6 package with 13 static IPs

32gb rig on a xeon E3 with samsumg 250gb ssd currently running ESXI 5.5

a minirig 1.8ghz ivy bridge which can be used for pfsense box, nginx reverse proxy, or whatever else 2gb ram, 8gb ssd

OVH VPS with 100mbps line, 10TB transfer per month

I figure the best way to leverage all of this is to populate the 32gb rig with 600mb 5gig VMs running Airtime. This affords me 50 VMs for the community. I will provide a 96kbps stream on each VM, relayed to the VPS. That will provide the community 1,000 concurrent listeners at all times.

The VPS has simple icecast2 mounts sourced from the server at my residence.

I can handle all of this on my own, except there is the limitation of the 13 static IPs. Esxi requires an IP for each VM, unless you get clever. I know there's a way to setup pfsense to port forward to VMs, but am not sure exactly how this works. I've also briefly messed with nginx reverse proxy to forward a subdomain to a specific port on an IP to a docker instance. I could do this again, except I have no clue how to create a docker container for Airtime.

Is this making sense to anyone? I need to somehow attach 50 different subdomains to 50 different VMs running their own instance of Airtime on my server. It seems there's more than a few ways of doing this. I'm not married to ESXI for this setup, but think it would be easier to manage like this. If someone can point me in the correct direction to get from where I'm at, to where I want to be, that would be amazing.

Do I:

1. go with pfesense on the minirig before esxi to forward ports to specific instances of VMs, which I will be able to somehow attach subdomains so as clients/members can dial into the VM by the subdomain setup with a nameserver.. is that possible?

2. configure the minirig as an nginx reverse proxy before esxi to forward ports to specific instances of VMs, which I will be able to somehow attach subdomains so as clients/members can dial into the VM by the subdomain setup with a nameserver.. is that possible?

3. ditch esxi, run nginx reverse proxy on the server and create a dockerfile for airtime, configuring the proxy and docker containers to a specific port which will resolve to a specific subdomain.

I don't care how I get there, it just needs to happen. I need to get passed this bit and focus in on the website itself.

Help?

breakingesxi · Jan 10, 2015, 9:20 PM

I've decided to go the third route. I'm going to ditch esxi, create an ubuntu 14.04LTS host, install nginx and create 12.04LTS 32bit dockerfiles with Airtime installed, then deploy this for 50 instances and configure each with a unique port in docker, and then use the reverse proxy to forward to translate each subdomain to the port and vice versa.