The solution...

Paul's picture
17
2009

Enter Virtualization!  I realized that for the cost of building and maintaining five pieces of hardware I could purchase two enterprise-class reliable servers with built-in redundancy. Each new piece of hardware would host several VMs dedicated to specific duties, thereby creating an infrastructure with robust software and robust hardware. Furthermore, since each VM is really a number of data files, it can be backed up, copied, cloned and moved without any re-installation.

 

Figure 2 shows my network after completion of the virtualization project. Each site has a reliable server hosting a number of VMs and each VM has been allocated duties that my experience has shown results in a robust installation over a long time period.

 

Home network after Virtualization

 

Figure 2: Home network after Virtualization. 

 

As we learned in the last article on VPN the two VPN servers (one at each site) are also the Default Gateways for all the computers at each respective site and only the VPN servers themselves have the Internet Gateway as their respective Default Gateways.