I recently found two Dell Poweredge R410 servers each with dual Xeon E5620 processors and 32 GB ram for cheap. What I want to do is cluster them so that they act as one device so that they can share system resources for the network load and virtual machines. Anyone have any thoughts on how this could be accomplished? I am not on a time line, just a project that I thought would be fun.
First, can you share a picture of the beasts 
You have a rpm about HA : nethserver-ha however not released in V7
But, with the power you have, I think also that you can install proxmox and play also with HA directly in the virtualisation side.
I haven’t played with Proxmox. I will have to check it out. I’ll also have to read up on ha. Here are a few pictures of the beasts. The mini-beasts. Lol
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They are surprisingly rather quiet, at least they are after initial boot up.
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@stephdl,
My goal, aside from learning, is to get them both to work as one unit… essentially as a hpc cluster. In my current setup I’m running one server. My download speeds before the firewall are around 350 MBps however after the firewall running IPS I get around 60 Mbps. If both were working together balancing the load I would imagine the speeds post IPS would be much faster. Not including the combined ram and cores for VM. Do you know if anyone has used NS in an HPC setup? It would be beneficial for gigabit speeds if IPS and DPI were being used to help increase throughput and virtual hosting abilities.
Not my zone of expertise, you have many scenarios for HA:
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I edited my last as you were responding. I realized that I was asking about ha when I should have been searching and reading.
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My 2 cents: use always an external storage for a cluster, dealing with software shared storage is quite hard if you don’t have any expertise.
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Update on the project. I ended up setting one of them with NS7 using it as my firewall, domain, etc (although I’ve run into some issues that I’m still trying to sort out) and I’ve got xenserver running on the other one. At first I was going to run proxmox or xen on both clustered and virtualize everything until I realized that the device I was going to use as a firewall wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do. Now to search the forum to see what I’m doing wrong with NS7. I can’t seem to get the vpn or Domain controller functions to work the want lol. Thanks to all for the advise and interest.
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