I haven't had much time to continue work on FreePanel, but the Perl modules I've written have proven to be useful in cluster management. Take a look at the following diagram as an example scenario:

There's two key points to take away from that diagram.

• physical servers are load balanced using a single VIP (Virtual IP)
• the servers share access to a single storage mount

So I've been working on a setup for virtualization, where currently I'm using one large iSCSI target from an OpenSolaris machine. It occurred to me that there is a downside to this. I cannot use zfs snapshots for individual machines and backups/restores will be more difficult. I also did not want to be hassled with having to connect the iscsi targets using iscsiadm every time I spin up a new VM.

People are lazy when it comes to regularly backing up their data. This is a project of mine that I use on a daily basis. It's a fairly simple to setup backup server that uses rsync over SSH to backup anything you give it. Best part about it is that it is cross platform compatible and can be scripted to backup multiple PCs at once. This is an very flexible way of creating a backup system and best of all is entirely open source and free.