After working heavily with virtualisation during my Industrial Year placement at Colchester Sixth Form College, I decided to build my own – albeit scaled-down – virtualised server.
The server would run VMWare ESXi, a free barebones hypervisor which would act as an extremely lightweight interface between multiple virtual machines and the physical hardware.
The basis for the machine is a Gigabyte micro-ATX motherboard, to allow the rig to fit in a pretty tiny “Cube” case. An Intel Core2Quad Q9550 CPU and 4GB of OCZ 800MHz DDR2 RAM make up the core of the system, with two Intel PRO-1000GT PCI gigabit network cards providing high-speed links to the rest of my physical network.
A finished Atlantis during ESXi installation
To enable the machine to run 24-7 at 100% load (one of the several virtual machines is a Folding@Home client), good airflow is needed through the case.
Because of both the size of the case and the positioning of the rig (it is below Galileo – my main desktop PC), this all-important airflow would be limited, so I chose to water-cool the processor and northbridge, even though I would be running the rig at stock speeds.
Watercooling the server proved to be a major challenge, due to the physical constraints of working inside such a small chassis! The photo on the right shows the server with a 17″ 4:3 monitor on top to give a size gauge. A single slimline 120mm raidator mounted with a Swiftech RadBox with two Xilence BlackLine fans in push-pull provide great cooling, although motherboard support within ESXi doesn’t give me any monitoring tools, so I’m really flying blind in terms of temperatures!
I am planning an Atlantis v2.0 build at some point, using a bigger case and a motherboard specifically chosen for ESXi compatibility, plus full hardware RAID for the two 1TB Samsung hard drives.
The current set-up is a complicated arrangement involving a virtual machine running the OpenFiler Linux NAS distribution, that has both drives mapped as a RAID-1 array and shared back to ESXi via a single iSCSI target, so it can definitely be improved!
More photos of Atlantis can be found on my Gallery.
