I'm rebuilding juniper this weekend. It was getting a bit crufty recently. Now that I've had a chance to get comfortable with Xen, I think I am ready to attempt putting windows under HVM using the IOMMU and getting VGA Passthru to work.
The goal is simple, get a full-time Linux desktop which can still play games.
I am aware that Valve/Steam is planning a Linux client, but I'm impatient. I also might learn something along the way.
In the meantime, I've noticed that there have been a few updates to LVM since I last vgcreate'd. RAID topologies are now possible without resorting to special hardware cards, or the dreaded mdadm.
My plan, as always, is to have LVM responsible for carving out block devices, but I'm taking it a bit further this time. LVM supports the idea of "Bootable" LVs. In practice, the place a small boot partition as the first LV in a PV and bios should be able to use it. The advantage is that this LV can be mirrored onto other PVs.
Another thing I might try out is XtreemFS. It is pegged as being a cloud scalable, drop-in replacement for NFS. It offers abilities such as ad-hoc expansion: just add more OSDs, resiliance: files can be stored in more than one OSD, performance: you can retrieve files from your nearest OSD or from multiple OSDs simultaneously and finally, fail-over: choose another OSD on the fly if the current one goes down.
OSD: Object Storage Device, aka. where files are actually written. XKCD:908 style.