- Use mac mini as server 2012 home lab driver#
- Use mac mini as server 2012 home lab full#
- Use mac mini as server 2012 home lab software#
VMotion (other virtualisation vendors have similar technologies) allows VMs running on one particular server, but with their files stored on shared storage, to automatically restart on another server if the first one goes down.
Use mac mini as server 2012 home lab driver#
Part of the driver for getting VMWare, in particular, working at home was that many of our customers use it for development, DR and so forth, and I wanted to test out VMWare's VMotion feature as an alternative to OBIEE's WebLogic-based clustering. The screenshot below shows this setup in action, and you can see the various VMs under the two hosts (servers), with various options to migrate them, manage them and so on.
Use mac mini as server 2012 home lab full#
Then, initially with the free version of VMWare's ESXi hypervisor, and then with the full VSphere setup courtesy of VMWare's "Guru Program", I put together a two-node cluster of VMWare ESXi hosts managed through VMWare VCenter, that can host upwards of 20 or so VMs as part of a single managed server pool. So, inspired by Steve Karam's excellent "Make your own VM training/lab environment for $900" blog post, I first built a VM Server with 32GB RAM and a bunch of SSDs and HDDs, then built a second server with 64GB of RAM and even more disks.
This worked well - and had the benefit of isolating one or two VMs on each Mac Mini, so performance issues didn't hit other VMs - but its an inefficient way to run VMs.
Remote Desktop can also manage VMs that run VNC as well, which comes as standard with Red Hat / Oracle Linux, or can be installed separately into Windows-based environments. These worked well, went in a cupboard under the stairs and ran nicely "headless", with desktop access again being through Remote Desktop, or VNC. Over the past few years I'd been buying a number of Mac Mini servers, each with 16GB RAM and managed centrally through Apple Remote Desktop, as shown in the screenshot below.
Use mac mini as server 2012 home lab software#
In addition, we're an Apple-centric family back home, with iMacs in most rooms, iPads and iPhones everywhere, so I thought it'd be a good opportunity to try out OS X Server as well, to see if I could add a bit of management to the whole network, and introduce things such as user and hardware policies, DNS and centralised software update, that sort of thing - as most people do on their home networks … (!) Like most Oracle tech enthusiasts, I've been a long-time user of tools such as VMWare and Virtualbox for desktop virtualisation, but over the past couple of years the scope and scale of Oracle Fusion Middleware has meant that a bit more of an "enterprise" approach had to be taken in my test lab. A little bit off-topic for once, but I thought one or two readers might be interested in the setup I've got back at my home office, for testing out and developing stuff around Oracle BI.
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