[HCoop-Discuss] Reorganizing, people-wise and tech-wise

[Adam Chlipala]

John T. Settino wrote:
>> Do we really need VMs? I know that virtualisation is hyped these days,
>> but they should be used with care. Just because we have several VMs,
>> we don't avoid a single point of failure.
>>     
> This is true, but do better solutions exist for dedicated a specific
> amount of CPU and memory to specific applications? Having a dedicated VM
> for each service can prevent one haywire service from taking down an
> entire infrastructure, as what happened when AFS borked on delueze the
> other day. If for example, email was fscking up, you could reboot the mail
> VM and not have to restart each and every service at the same time because
> you rebooted the machine they were all housed on.
>   

I agree that this is a very attractive benefit of virtualization, and 
perhaps it's the only benefit that's really relevant to our near-term 
plans.  (Being able to transfer virtual machines across physical servers 
might make the list, too.)

> Does anyone have an accurate listing of just how much data the coop is
> using? I'm not sure. This would definitely indicate the size of NAS or
> storage devices we would need to purchase for any RAID arrays.
>   

Current disk usage on deleuze's AFS partition is 112313540 kB.  This 
doesn't really measure how much demand there is, though, since we've 
been clear so far that it's prohibitively expensive for us to add new 
storage.  I expect we can easily use up terabytes of disk space with 
reasonable projections of membership growth.