Four machines, one infrastructure

The goal

Build one integrated infrastructure across four physical machines: three hosts running virtual machines and a fourth used as the client workstation. The components — server virtualization, network virtualization, storage virtualization, shared storage, containerization and desktop virtualization — had to work together as a single path.

The path

Physical client → remote desktop → virtual desktop → virtual network → web application → Docker container → shared storage → LVM storage.

That chain was the real design constraint. The client had to land on the right virtual desktop; the desktop had to reach the virtual network; the web application had to run inside its container; and the container's data had to live on shared storage backed by LVM.

What I worked on

• Planned the addressing and network layout for the hosts, virtual machines and client.
• Combined server, network and storage virtualization in one environment.
• Configured shared storage and LVM-backed volumes.
• Deployed the web application in a Docker container.
• Set up remote desktop access from the physical client to a virtual desktop.
• Traced the full application path end to end and fixed connectivity, storage and service issues along the way.

What I learned

An integrated infrastructure is mostly a chain of dependencies. Each layer can look healthy on its own; the real work is in the handoffs — the route, the mount, the port, the credential. Building the whole path made the architecture easier to reason about than studying each component in isolation.