09 April 2013

Searching for the perfect small business server

One of the big challenges for small businesses, especially service-based organizations, is a server infrastructure that is both resilient of failures and inexpensive. Small businesses can't typically afford to shell out the cash for a SAN and high availability servers. Yet they still need their servers to operate with a high level of reliability.

This post will attempt to describe one solution that I have been designing, and why each choice was made.

Base Computer: Mac Mini (quad-core)
System Drive: External storage in Hardware RAID-1
Backup Drives: Internal Hard Drive, 2x USB Drives (swapped each day, one taken home)
Virtual Machine Software: ???
Virtual Server: Windows Server

So what does this complicated setup gain me?

Mac server + System Drive on external storage
In my testing months ago, it was possible to install OS X onto an external drive and boot from it. Then, I could actually power down the computer, take the external drive and plug it into another (different!) Mac and boot that from the external drive. The original system came up on the different hardware like nothing happened.

This is a great hardware failure recovery story. Say the power supply burns out in your server... Just grab any other (Intel-based) mac, plug in the external storage, hold shift while booting, boot from the external storage, and the server is back up! No sophisticated expertise required.

This is just not possible in Windows or Linux.

The RAID inclusion is to address the fact that hard drives fail pretty often compared to other parts of the system. With a mirror, you can lose a drive without taking the server down. Otherwise, this common failure would result in a "restore from backup" situation. Hardware RAID-1, 2-bay enclosures are not all that expensive (~$200) compared to the cost of unexpected downtime during critical business hours.

Backup drives
Backing up using the built-in Time Machine software. The simple reason for using the internal hard drive as a backup is because it's already there anyway. The 2 USB drive setup allows you to swap out the backup each day so that you can take a backup offsite after hours. Technically, both backups are actually onsite most of the time: one plugged in, and one in your car or on your desk so you can remember to swap it. So if it really bothers you that your backups are onsite most of the time, then you can even go to 3 USB backup drives. You can never have too many, really.

Virtual Server
Let's face it; OS X Server has had some really mixed reviews. On top of that, OS X server might not support the apps that you typically run (e.g. ASP.NET). So why choose? Use Virtual Machine software to run the server you need on top of OS X.

To make this setup work, all data files should actually be shared from the host OS (Mac OS X) so they are backed up by the host OS, and are not internal to the VM. Then the VM simply uses the shared folder from the host OS for server functions (file sharing, web serving, database backups). So the data is automatically backed up by time machine, and not a backup within a VM backup situation.

What about the VM itself? Since the data is hosted external the VM, the VM ends up just being valuable for it's server configuration. Since the VM file will change very often while running, it should be excluded from backup. (Copying a multi-gigabyte file every hour will eat up your Time Machine backup space quickly.) When there is a configuration change, the VM should be copied (probably offline) to a folder that is backed up, so the server configuration is backed up.

The complete restore process ends up being: Restore Time Machine backup to new Mac. Copy VM from backup location to correct location so it can be run. Done.

Another advantage to having the server run in a VM is that you have remote administration capabilities (through the host OS) that ordinarily cost a lot of money to implement with real servers. The main things I'm thinking of there are remote power on/off, booting in a recovery mode, inserting CDs (by connecting ISO images as drives), etc. These things are extremely convenient to be able to do remotely.

VM Software
So the main reason this is still a work in progress is because I have not yet picked out VM software to make this work. My primary low/no-cost candidates are VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox; both of which can be run headless and scripted to start on computer startup. But, there are still wrinkles to iron out. For instance, I'm not sure if folders that come from the host OS can be reshared as Windows file shares. I'll probably have to adjust the design based on experimentation.

Conclusion
This is a work in progress. I still have things to figure out. However, I believe this kind of setup would create a really compelling story for small businesses who require low and remote maintenance with a relatively inexpensive server for it's level of resilience (including data backups).

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