Over the last months I have been thinking about my local network at home again, realizing that sooner or later the server will get some hardware failure and stop functioning. Now, it is not the server that is so important. After al that is just hardware. The most important is the data. This became quite apparent lately as one of the hard disks had bad blocks that went undetected by the RAID card (that I replaced immediately after by a better card). 

Come to think of it, the data is already quite safe, mirrored and backed up, but it is not the pure data. It is all the server itself. By now it is running so many services that I really would not like to set it up from scratch once more as I did in 2006. Another problem is that upgradeabilty of the server is not that easy since the server installation is hardware-dependent. This is because it is running hardware RAID (Areca) and because it is using a TV card. 

Thinking about his some more, I already came to the conclusion that virtualization could help in this respect. In particular:

• the server will become more hardware independent (at least the RAID card dependence can be removed) so I can more easily upgrade it
• in case of hardware failures I can easily switch to different hardware. Even live migration could be possible
  
• it allows splitting up the server in different appliances, separating different types of functionality such as "server", "software dev", "mythtv", "virtual windows", "file server"

But then there is a cascade effect because for this migration to work, I would definitely also need to remove the RAID card alltogether and use a storage area network with RAID functionality. Of course, it must still be bootable over the network so that would mean i would need something like iSCSI. 

Cascading even further, my server system now consists of several differently shaped boxes which is not that nice, so if I am going to buy new stuff a standardized form factor (rackmount) is also necessary. 

So here are the keywords describing the next step in my local network:

• storage area network based on iSCSI
• virtualization based on XEN
• form factor: rackmount

The rackmount UPS is already on the way... And, did you know Dell has very nice rackmount servers (quad core intel xeon) for onder EUR 1000?