[HLUG] Virtulisation and file systems

[Paul Stenning]

Hi all,

We are looking to rationalise the number of PCs that are on and running 
24 hours a day, and doing very little most of the time other than 
wasting electricity and generating heat.  Currently we have:

* Windows 2003 R2 file server
* Ubuntu 7.10 web development server
* Windows XP weather station PC (uploads data from weather station to 
internet every 15 mins)
* General "office" PC (Windows XP, probably upgrading to Vista)

I would like to combine the first three into one machine.  The existing 
file server (which has a proper server motherboard with a 3GHz P4, 500GB 
of RAID1 storage and 2GB RAM) can be rebuilt with Ubuntu 8.04 (probably 
server with Gnome added) and used for the file serving and web serving. 
  I would add an extra hard disk for the operating system and use the 
500GB RAID as /home.  This would get rid of the web dev server, which is 
an old 1.6GHz P4.

This machine also has a DLT tape backup drive and I am currently using 
Backup Exec.  What tape backup options are available Linux; preferably 
point-and-click rather than command line?  I am not expecting to be able 
to restore old BackupExec backups.

We also synchronise it daily to two Maxtor 500GB OneTouch drives (only 
one connected at a time) as a secondary backup.  What Linux software is 
available for that (again point-and-click)?

Is it possible to convert the 500GB drives (within the server and the 
Maxtor USB ones) from NTFS to some file system that Linux supports 
natively, without having to wipe and reformat?  I'm guessing the answer 
is NO there!

Also for the USB ones I would like them to be readable on Windows PCs 
too, so I assume they will need to be FAT32?  Or is Linux write support 
for NTFS reliable now?

The weather station software is Windows only, and won't run on Vista (so 
can't go on the office PC when updated).  This has to remain on either 
Windows XP or Windows 2000.  However it's system resource usage is 
light.  This is the problem one.

I would like to run this as a virtual machine on the Ubuntu server, but 
I need to sort out whether it will communicate with the weather station 
OK this way.  The interface is USB.  Does anyone know what the situation 
is with virtualisation environments such as VMware or VirtualBox with 
regard to accessing physical USB ports from the guest operating system? 
  I don't think WINE is viable for this as the weather station software 
is a bit iffy and uses loads of DLLs etc.

If this will work then we will have one server handling all that, plus 
the "office" PC for office stuff.

Sorry for the long email.....  Thoughts anyone, please?

Thanks,
Paul.