#me how to open the controllers setting for the game n use a template someone made for it

[arcadequeerz]

my day be so fine. then Boom. Immediately broke game i just bought on steam.

[strangely-compelling-blog]

Virtualize Like a Boss (Part 1)

Some of my colleagues may know that I have, for many years, maintained a collection of hosting accounts for my personal pursuits. For nearly a decade now there has been at least one Linux dedicated virtual machine I've maintained at all times hosting dozens of different domains, and over the years IIS hosts have come and gone as well, plus several Mac OS servers, and even the occasional home-built contraption. All of them have existed, more or less, for a few basic purposes:

As platforms for me to use in testing out my ideas or in pursuing various projects.

As environments where I can set up certain development platforms for experimentation or study (like LAMP, MEAN, and all of those acronym-ish things).

As a place to store my personal stuff that I want to make accessible to the wider web.

As a giant dumping ground for the gazillions of (non-work) emails I get and never read.

In short, these environments have existed as the backbone of my own personal laboratory of sorts - one that exists as my virtual mad-scientist lair for personal and professional growth. And hey, it's been great - and valuable. But it has also been expensive.

I sat down a month or so back and I started doing the math on just how much all of this experimentation has been costing me, and I came up with an ugly figure: Over the past 10 years, I have spent (conservatively) at least $8,000 just paying someone to serve my bits and bytes - and that's not counting the cost of domain registrations... which (though obscenely high in my case) brings the total to well over $10,000.

Now don't get me wrong - in the grand scheme of things, I recognize that $10,000 over 10 years may not seem like that much. Plenty of people, after all, blow that much on cigarettes and booze alone. But not being one prone to excess in these areas... and looking at this from my analytical perspective, I just couldn't escape thinking of that $10,000 (which I've essentially poured into someone else's pants-pockets) as more like the $16,000 to $24,000 it could have been if poured it instead into some suitable investment medium over that same timeframe. And that got me casting about looking for some alternatives.

Enter the fine folks at Antsle.

Antsle is a San Diego based startup that markets what they call a "personal cloud server". What the Antsle really is, however, is a nicely designed little server running a custom built OS that is really good at bare-metal virtualization. That is, it's a machine that you can stick on your home network, and then upon which you can spin up as many virtual machines as you might want (within reason, people)... for whatever purposes you might have. Home media server? Gotcha covered. Running a game server? Heck yes. Wanting to set up a MEAN stack for exploration, or wanting to write that killer web-app you've had bumping around your cranium? Covered. Basically, it's like having 1-n physical machines running all of the things you've always wanted to tinker with, except without cluttering up your living room, decimating your electric bill, and angering your spouse. And you can do all of that without having to pay your friendly neighborhood hosting provider one cent. At least that's how Antsle spins it. Of course, we all know that although you can expose machines on your local network to the outside world, your ISP is probably going to be pretty upset if you try and run your publicly accessible Mumble server across your home internet connection. And rightfully so, since it straight-up violates their TOS. So, there are practical limits to how much you can really make publicly consumable from one of these machines, should you so choose. That said, the value proposition of an Antsle really got me thinking: how much of what I have sitting out there with a public face actually needs that face? How much of it is stuff that I actually must expose, and how much of it is stuff I have out there just because I required a customizable and accessible web hosting environment in order to build it?

My answer to these questions is that at least 80% of what I do on my publically accessible server(s) is stuff that can sit on my private network instead until such time that it graduates into something I'd like to share with others. Therefore (if you want to be just a tad bit overly simplistic) I've been paying 80% too much every month. For 10 years. What if I could move all of that onto one machine on my local network - a machine where I could install many different instances of operating systems, for which I could develop using the environments and platforms in which I am interested... and which I could pay for once and then use until it is old and tired?

Thus began my quest to virtualize my home lab.

Buy or Build?

Obviously with an Antsle you can get up and running doing virtualization for your home lab in minutes. And honestly, if you just want to save some hosting money and have something that gives you the flexibility to experiment and tinker across many different platforms, then get yourself an Antsle One (or if you are spendy, one of its big brothers) and be done with it. Antsle promises you can spin up virtual machines in seconds, and the Antsle OS takes care of creating local domains for your virtual machines, routing for them on your LAN, and more automatically. With all that, it's essentially a no-muss no-fuss sort of arrangement: you get to spin up environments to suit your whims with wild abandon, and Antsle takes care of all the murky details which would otherwise make this experience much more painful. Antsle will even allow you to spin up environments using templates where the OS is already installed, which means that in less than 10 seconds you can ostensibly go from zero to a fully configured machine running Debian, or CentOS, or Ubuntu, or Free BSD, or even Windows... completely ready and just waiting for you to build something cool (and already on your local network ready for you to work your magic). From my perspective, that's a compelling value story. So listen: if I just described you, stop reading right here. Go visit Antsle.com and pick up one of their machines - they have a 30 day money back guarantee, and they will even let you pay for it over 12 months, no credit check required. So really, what are you waiting for? Just go.

Walking the Path of Pain

The fact that you are still reading must mean that you, like me, enjoy torturing yourself rummaging about in the guts of complex systems. Because: "It's fun". Or maybe you just want to get more out of the experience of doing this stuff than just havingvirtualization: you want to learn something about how virtualization works and you want mastery over setting up and maintaining the infrastructure itself: you don't just want to virtualize, you want to virtualize like a boss. If so, the very first thing you will need to do is get your steamy hands on some decent hardware.

Hardware Selection

Decent hardware is not, as one might expect, hard to come by. This is especially true if you are a spendy ubermensch endowed with a Daddy Warbucks level of largesse. But if you, like me, are an economic miser looking for greatest amount of bang for least amount of buck, then you need to give thought to the desired characteristics of the system you are want to deploy. For me, I wanted a system that had at least the bulk of the following characteristics:

I wanted professional grade equipment (no NUCs or other such gizmos.)

I wanted something that had a reasonable expandability in terms of memory and hard drive storage.

I wanted something that I could upgrade later if possible for greater processing power.

I wanted something that wasn't huge, or ugly, or loud.

I wanted something that didn't need to be rack-mounted.

I wanted something that wasn't incredibly expensive.

That may all sound terribly contradictory for a server that one is going to use for virtualization, but it turns out that it occurred to the good folks at HPE (that's Hewlett Packard Enterprise) that some crazy individuals might want exactly those things... so they cooked up all of those ingredients into a really lovely little server they call the HPE Proliant Microserver Gen 8.

The ProLiant Microserver Gen 8 is a small business class server, and it comes with all of the bells and whistles any normal HPE server would. It features two 1 gigabit network ports, plus it features a dedicated ILO4 port (that's HP's Integrated Lights Out server management system) so that you can access your server for maintenance and configuration over the network - whether it is on or not. It also features instant out of the box provisioning and deployment, and it comes with four front accessible drive bays that can be configured for RAID 0 - 5 using a built in Smart Array B120i controller. It has 6 USB ports (4 USB2 and 2 USB3) - two accessible from the front, and it has a single PCIe expansion slot for who knows what you might want to shove in there. Finally, the CPU is socketed, so you can upgrade the CPU to whatever pin-compatible generation of chip you can lay your hands on - a nice feature if you want to start with an entry level machine. It has a beefy (for the size) power supply with an overly-large fan... which means the fan usually runs at a really low RPM, making it very quiet. It has a fantastic build quality; the handsomely designed magnetic-closure front door appears to be cast metal, and the easily opened case is heavy-gauge steel. It even thoughtfully comes with a service tool (an allen wrench, really) affixed to the front right next to the drives you'll need it to remove. Finally, it accomplishes all of that in a small form factor (roughly a slightly less than 10 x 10 inch cube) that will sit on your desk happily (and handsomely). Congrats to HPE, because this is a very well thought-out and well-executed design.

The best thing about the MicroServer Gen8? Price. You can get one of these on Amazon for as little as $379, depending on which model you want to pick up. At the low end, you'll be getting an Intel Celeron (G1610T) based machine. But remember: this CPU is socketed and is pin compatible with up to a Xeon E3 v2. Some people are even pushing a beefier 4-core CPU (the Xeon E3-1265LV2) into the box, which appears to be fine even though the chip exceeds the max rated power a bit. So, even though the Gen8 is getting a little long in the tooth CPU-wise, you can upgrade this machine to a more powerful pin-compatible CPU later if you so choose without much fuss. Be aware that the low end box will also come with no drives and only 4GB of RAM. So, CPU question aside, you'll obviously need to upgrade the machine at least a bit before use if you start at the entry level. If you plan to do that with parts you may have laying around, take note: the machine uses unbuffered RAM, and your mileage may vary with drives, so read up on what is compatible; WD and Seagate drives should work fine in capacities up to 4TB (HP says 3).

All in all I think the Gen 8 is the little engine that can; although there are many, many other options for hardware to use, for me this little machine really offers an optimal mix of price / performance / palatability. Can you get yourself a blade server that will take more RAM and have more slots for the same ball-park price? You bet. However, unless you happen to have a rack sitting around waiting for it (or you don't mind a noisy jet engine taking up half your desk) that just isn't a great option for most people. I did opt for a higher-powered unit out of the chute; I purchased the 783959-S01 model, which comes loaded with 4 1TB drives, 8 GB of memory (one bank), and a Xeon E3 V2. I added a second stick of 8GB RAM to max it out, and still managed all of that for under $1000.

Two downsides for the power-max crowd: max memory on this box is, as I alluded to above, 16GB. That's a bit low if you want to virtualize like a boss and run all those VM's simultaneously... but from my perspective, I'm not likely to run more than 5 or 6 at the same time. So, this is adequate. The other downside is that the drives are not hot-swappable. But again, you want to virtualize your home lab, right? It's not like a drive failure is going to take down your enterprise just because you need to shut the box down for 10 minutes.

So, yeah: I love me some Gen 8 MicroServer. Full specs here.

Virtualizing...

Once you have your hardware lined up, you are going to need to confront the question of what route to use for virtualization. You can choose a containerization route, where you use a so-called "type 2" hypervisor to host your virtual machines on an operating system that is installed on your physical hardware. This will no-doubt feel very familiar to anyone who has ever spun up a virtual machine on their desktop, because in practice this is a lot like running something like VMWare or VirtualBox locally and then spinning up virtual machines using these tools. And just as with those products, the virtual machines you run using a type 2 hypervisor all utilize the host operating system for their core services. As such they suffer from any limitations the host OS itself may bring to the table. The alternative approach to this is using what is sometimes called a "bare metal" (type 1) hypervisor. These hypervisors are distinguished from type 2 hypervisors in that they install directly on the machine with no operating system layer sitting between them and the hardware itself (hence the term "bare metal"). In real terms, when you use a type 1 hypervisor, the hypervisor itself is the operating system - one designed specifically to do only one thing as efficiently as possible: act as the host for 1 - n virtual machines. So which route to take?

There are probably good arguments for why one might want to use a type 2 (hosted) hypervisor over a type 1 (bare metal) hypervisor... I'm just not aware of any. Well ok, one: it's easier. But my admittedly narrow perspective on the matter is that it is best to eliminate as much as you can of what could be sitting between your virtual machines and the hardware they are running on, under the theory that added layers increase opportunities for inefficiency that can impact performance. Memory utilization in and of itself is a good reason to go with a type 1 hypervisor, as there is little reason for you to allow a bloated host OS to consume memory that would otherwise be available to your virtual machines were you instead running a slim and optimized hypervisor only. So, from my perspective, the choice really isn't between a type 1 and a type 2 hypervisor, it really boils down to which bare metal (type 1) hypervisor you are going to use.

To VMWare or Not to VMWare

There are quite a few type 1 hypervisors available, running on multiple Linux variants as well as windows. Among them are products by Oracle, Microsoft, and VMWare, as well as open-source alternatives. So which to choose? This is a complicated topic, so I think it is helpful to break the question down into more easily digestible chunks. Personally, I'm in this not just to virtualize, but to learn. If I'm going to muck about installing a hypervisor, I want it to be one that is relevant. That means choosing one of the hypervisors that are most commonly used in industry, which narrows the field down quite a bit. Finally, being mr. cheap, I would like to install something that is free. And as audacious as that sounds, it turns out that there are in fact multiple type 1 hyper that are free.

Here's a short list that satisfies both sets of these criteria (commonly used & free):

VMWare ESXi

Microsoft Hyper-V

Citrix XenServer

To jump straight to the point, I chose VMWare ESXi. There are a number of reasons for this.

First, my perspective is that VMWare offers a more robust and well-supported product with more bells and whistles. If one looks at a comparison between these popular hypervisors, it's clear that VMWare offers a stronger set of offerings in the free tier, from my perspective. As an example, the most recent versions of VMWare ESXi feature a very nice web user interface for managing your ESXi instance and all of your virtual machines. You can even launch consoles for these virtual machines directly from the web client to interact directly with the VM and its operating system. By comparison, Microsoft Hyper-V uses power-shell with no GUI at all, and enabling a GUI for the product is quite convoluted. And although xenServer offers a GUI, I feel it is nowhere near as evolved as ESXi's tooling, nor as easily accessed. When installing ESXi, once the server is up you can hit its IP address ( http://yourServerIP/ui/ ) and the GUI is already installed and ready to go.

Second, HP and VMWare have a partnership and the folks at HP Enterprise have gone out of their way to ensure that installing VMWare on HPE iron is insanely simple to do. To that end, HP Enterprise has provided customized installer ISO disk images for the VMWare product which are preconfigured for easy installation using HPE's intelligent provisioning tool (get those images here). With intelligent provisioning, you need to do little more than point the server at a USB thumb-drive containing your ISO, and intelligent provisioning will do the rest. And as mentioned, once that process is done the GUI for VMWare is already ready to roll. That means you can go straight to creating your virtual machines rather than wasting cycles doing more work to configure the server; this is a huge productivity win.

In any case, for all of these reasons and more, my choice was VMWare, and that's what we'll cover installing and using. But not today, friends - I've gone on long enough. Look for how to install ESXi and spin up virtual machines like a pro in Part 2.