I might change how it's running, but everything is behaving well.

After installing the smaller SAS drives, and tinkering with some BIOS formatting, the system was able to see and use the 146GB disks. It can see, but not use the 300GB disks (they show as 0b or unformatted, but present). I'm considering nabbing some more 146GB for some local storage. I don't have anywhere to use the 300GB, but can keep them as spares, I suppose. Alternatively, I can rebuild the T5220 with all 300GB disks, and use the 146GB it has in the X4600 M2. Seems like a lot of work, and the T5220 is already running DB and other services, so probably just going to let it be.

Once the BIOS formatted and exposed the disks, I was able to install CentOS on there. I'm still vascillating on CentOS or Ubuntu or even something like CoreOS. The  idea I'm pursuing is that the base OS will do little more than run containers, and that the container support is where I'll spend most of my systems stuff. For now I've got CentOS with Docker, and then am playing with Rancher to poke with the containerizing. The machine has 8xQuad CPU (which it sees as 32xCPU), and 128GB of RAM, so it can spare some overhead of fat-ish containers and VMs.

Using Rancher turned out to be a little triciker than I wanted. I had also considered Kubernetes, but thought I'd play a little. There are instructions for single-node installations, but they break down when you try to add the Rancher "server" also as an "agent." So I put the "server" on my Hex-core CPU workstation, figuring it would really only do much work when managing Rancher, which has worked out so far. I thought to put Rancher "server" on the server hostin this blog, but it's busy right now. Maybe after I migrate the rest of the services to the new server.

Storage, still, is the problem. The server currently running this blog has more than 1TB of storage, and it's using about half of that. Some of that is wasted with old downloads, copies of things, and other unused things. The backup server has 3TB of storage, which I'm tinkering with as an NFS server until I bite and set something real up. With the unused parts of the 3TB available as an NFS share to the big CPU/RAM server, I think I can get down to business.

The first things I'm doing are moving my Git Web server to a GitLab install. The server set-up has been easy ('though it's running on the workstation/Rancher "server" instead of the other thing while I try to make NFS work). It'll take a little more tinkering to get the storage and GitLab running int he right spot, but then I should have a straight-forward task of moving my repos to the new server (clone, change upstream, push...).

Then I'm going to move my Jenkins from this server to the big one. That should be pretty straight-forward, too, and shouldn't require any special storage. The jobs aren't that plentiful, and the workspaces are deleted with each build.

Then I'll start migrating the web server and backing application servers. Here I've got more work to do. I'm running Apache 2.2 built from source now, and would like to jump into an Apache 2.4 run from installed modules instead. Bigger is that I want to reimagine how I add the software and such to the sites. Like this blog, downloaded from a site, exploded in a folder, configured, etc... Some thought about the Tomcat servers and Ratpack apps that serve some of the other things, too. Some of that can run on the other server, too, but it can't run Docker/Rancher, so I would have to make that still a manual process.

Ooh, and then e-mail. That means migrating the mail servers, storage, and account tools. There are only a handful of users sending and fetching through the mail server, but it does receive e-mail for several domains and proxies them for eventual consumption at other mail services. Thankfully, that's already mostly containerized, and doesn't really use a lot of storage ('though I'm sure I'll want to not have that in a container's space!).

In all, the server is running, there is software installing, and services responding. Still things to do, but no longer just warming the basement.