Hi everyone,
I wanted to share a recent “small win” from our Networking Student Activity Unit at Institut Teknologi Tangerang Selatan (ITTS), Indonesia.
The Context Our junior students were highly motivated to build a “simple cloud” for the campus lab. Their initial thought was to use VMware ESXi, as it is the standard they often hear about. However, I saw this as a perfect opportunity to introduce them to a more powerful, flexible, and open-source alternative: LXD.
The Challenge We were working with an aging IBM System x3650 M4. It’s a beast of a machine, but setting it up in 2025 came with challenges. We spent about 7 hours (from 1 PM to 8 PM) struggling with the hardware, specifically configuring the RAID controller (WebBIOS) to properly present the drives for our needs.
The Setup We decided to go with a split storage configuration:
- OS: Ubuntu Server on a RAID 1 mirror.
- Storage Pool: A dedicated ZFS pool on a separate disk array for LXD.
Why LXD? The biggest selling point for the students was LXD Projects. Instead of a messy lab where everyone steps on each other’s toes, we can now assign a specific Project to each student member. They get their own isolated workspace to spin up containers and VMs without affecting others. It is structured, clean, and a much better learning environment than a traditional hypervisor setup.
It was a tiring 7-hour sprint, but seeing the server running and accessible via our campus LAN was worth it. We are now ready to teach the next generation about system containers and virtualization using Ubuntu technologies.
Thanks to the community for the documentation that helped us through the ZFS and networking configuration!