I now have all these VM’s and physical devices; each usually having their own dashboard or other way of monitoring the resources being used. But it is a pain to look in numerous locations to see how much RAM is being used or that my storage drives are full. I could have kept relying on the Xen Orchestra monitoring features to provide 90% of the solution, but that still wouldn’t address the other physical hardware I have like my switch, wireless AP, etc. So I started looking to 3rd party solutions. My “requirements” are it needs to monitor everything I have, support alerting via email, and be open source. Nearly all my hardware (and software via snmp packages) supports SNMP and Syslog, so getting information out shouldn’t be a problem. Syslog is going to ELSA in my Security Onion vm. This post will focus on SNMP.
just my own personal notes that i don't want to forget
Tag: server
After messing with hosting my own email server on and off for years (sendmail, qmail, postfix, etc), with more off than on, I decided I need the ability to receive and forward mail outbound. I do NOT need to receive email, that is what Gmail is for. This server will not be exposed to the Internet and any real mail addressed to <user>@jamestimberlake.com is handled by my DNS provider, relaying it to Gmail.
Why the need to relay email? Primarily I have a multi-function printer/copier/scanner/fax and I’d like to be able to scan directly to email from the front panel. Secondly I have numerous things I’d like to receive alerts on, for example SMART data from a dying hard drive. All these things can be told to email to a SMTP server. The postfix MTA comes installed on even a minimal Centos install, but it doesn’t scale well to configure each vm as a Postfix forwarder. But the big kick in the teeth is my ISP.
Why Xenserver? I’ve used Esxi, Proxmox, oVirt, and rolled my own hypervisors in the past. Xenserver provides the right blend of features, price (free), and command-line API. It has its quirks (they all do), but they are easily solved.
Having used 6.2 and 6.5 previously, this was my first look at 7.0. The install is the same familiar Redhat-based text mode. During install, I set the management network to NIC0 with static IP. Once installed and rebooted, I installed the latest XenCenter GUI in a Windows 10 VirtualBox VM I keep around for stuff like this and got to setting it up.
After over a decade of limping along with the same ancient Pentium 3 and 4 “servers”, I decided to finally throw some money at the problem. Some of these servers were actually laptops, and the best/most recent machine was a box I built for Mythtv…in 2004. 32-bit, PATA, oh my.
I picked up a Dell Poweredge R710 barebones (dual 870W power supplies, dual heatsinks, PERC 6/i, iDRAC enterprise, no RAM, no CPU) on Ebay then configured it to my liking with other Ebay or Amazon purchases: dual L5640’s, 48GB (6 x 8GB) RAM, H200 RAID card. I started with the LFF model, which supports 6 3.5″ drives in the front hotswap sleds. Since this will be a hyperconverged (computer and storage) host, these will house multi-terabyte HDD’s. More on that later. I can expand the RAM up to 12 (full speed) or 18 sticks if I need to.
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