ILRI Research Computing

Group like servers with similar functionality or which serve certain groups.

• Consolidate LIMS systems (ILRI and ICRISAT)
• Consolidate Bioinformatics servers in one rack
  • Which servers?
• Students, database, web

Group is moving to Congo and will host their server there.

http://192.168.5.4

We use virtualization to run several machines on one physical machine. This enables students and researchers to install and configure applications for testing without having to allocate/manage physical hardware.

We have typically used VMware but are looking into alternative virtualization solutions as VMware is proprietary and its management tools are only usable on Windows.

There are two VMware servers:

• ESXi 3.5 "bare metal": 172.26.0.200
• CentOS with VMware: 172.26.0.205

I have obtained a VMware ESXi 4.0 license:

5428H-2E003-58338-0R926-C820M

• VMware ESXi: http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/
• Interesting link about installing VMware ESXi on a flash disk to test: http://kuparinen.org/martti/comp/vmware/esxionusb.html

From Sun. More oriented towards desktop virtualization, but is very fast and has headless management options. There is also a new web interface. It is also liberally licensed and runs on many platforms, making it a very appealing alternative.

Performance is better, and it does not run "bare metal," so you can configure and secure the host OS like you would any other server. Management wise, it is at least as good as VMware because you can use the management application over the network with X forwarding, or directly on the command line with VirtualBox's tools (VBoxManage, etc). There are also web frontends being developed.

• Virtualbox: http://www.virtualbox.org/

• Virtualbox web interface: http://code.google.com/p/vboxweb/
• Easier command line control than VBox's built ins: http://vboxtool.sourceforge.net/