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Luna Node Dynamic | OpenStack KVM VPS | Toronto | High availability
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Luna Node Dynamic | OpenStack KVM VPS | Toronto | High availability

hbjlee17hbjlee17 Member, Host Rep
edited May 2014 in Offers

Luna Node Dynamic - dynamic virtualization platform (KVM)

Luna Node Dynamic is an hourly billing virtualization platform featuring rapid virtual machine deployment, hourly billing, snapshotting capabilities (and imaging existing or new virtual machines from these snapshots), an API for automation, and more. Servers are currently provisioned out of Toronto (with Cogent).

Luna Node has been around for nine months, offering reliable KVM virtual private servers at affordable prices. We use OpenStack for Luna Node Dynamic backend.

Here's a more detailed feature explanation:

  • Hourly billing - only need a virtual machine for a few days, or don't know how long you'll want to use it for? Or have dynamic needs that require changing numbers of instances? Luna Node Dynamic allows you to destroy your virtual machine at any time, and then only pay for the hours (instead of months) that it was used for. The service is prepaid, with Paypal and Bitcoin (via Coinbase) as our current billing options.
  • Custom operating systems - you can submit a URL (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, etc.) and the system will download your ISO image or qcow2 template. Once downloaded, you can provision new virtual machines with the custom operating system. For ISO images, OS installation can be completed via VNC.
  • Snapshotting - hit a button to snapshot your virtual machine, and the current state of the disk image will be saved. You can then use it to restore your virtual machine to a previous saved state or to provision more machines. Snapshots are charged at $0.02 / GB / month (billed hourly); the first 20 GB is currently free but this is subject to change.
  • High-availability - if a compute node goes down due to hardware failure, virtual machines on that node will be automatically "evacuated" to another node. If upgrades need to be performed on a node, then VMs will be live migrated with no downtime or reboot.
  • API - we provide a simple API that you can use to manage your servers without going through the web UI.
  • Track billing - a Billing tab is inluded in the Luna Node Dynamic panel that allows you to check your expenses for each month, with expenses sorted by day.
  • Floating IP addresses - you can keep IP addresses on reserve in your account for $1/month (billed hourly). This means you can easily switch an external IP address between different virtual machines on your account. Additionally, if you don't need a VM for the time being you can snapshot it and then disassociate its floating IP address so that you only have to pay for the storage space and IP.
  • Redundant cloud storage - VM's are provisioned on top of a distributed, fault-tolerant filesystem to prevent data loss
  • Private virtual networks - you can create a private virtual network, and the private interface of virtual machines in that network will be isolated. (Each network is $4/month, billed hourly.)
  • Load balancing, firewall, VPN as a service - inside your private network, these features are available. See https://wiki.lunanode.com/index.php/Virtual_networks for details. Currently you have to open a ticket for setup and configuration, but we are working on integrating it into the Luna Node Dynamic panel.

To get started, you can create an account from our billing panel for twelve dollars (so you will get $12.00 of credit with the initial account). More credit can be added directly from the Luna Node Dynamic panel (but support is handled through the billing panel).

You can open a ticket within the first week to request a refund of remaining credit on your account, no questions asked.

Plans

  • 512 MB - 1 vCPU, 15 GB storage, 1000 GB bandwidth, $0.005 hourly ($3.6 monthly)
  • 1024 MB - 2 vCPU, 20 GB storage, 1500 GB bandwidth, $0.0072 hourly ($5.18 monthly)
  • Storage 250 GB - 512 MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 250 GB storage, 1500 GB bandwidth, $0.0063 hourly ($4.54 monthly)

Port speed is 1 gbit/s. Click here for full plan list.

Locations

Test IP for Toronto location is here: http://38.110.116.254/100MB.test

There is also a legacy Chicago location, it does not have several of the features mentioned above.

Links:

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Comments

  • ub3rstarub3rstar Member
    edited May 2014

    Too bad you need to make a $12 deposit even if you only want to try out the Toronto VPS for a month

    Thanked by 1perennate
  • hbjlee17hbjlee17 Member, Host Rep

    unfortunately that is the case, its an attempt to deter spammers from registering in the first place

  • said: Storage 250 GB - 512 MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 250 GB storage, 1500 GB bandwidth, $0.0063 hourly ($4.54 monthly)

    What's the case to do a storage VPS with high availablity?

    I really have nothing against, but i've seen many benchmark which shows, that OpenStack is slowly and have less availablity than custom solutions. And for storage server, i think OpenStack will just make it a slow shit)

    Thanked by 1perennate
  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep

    ub3rstar said: Too bad you need to make a $12 deposit even if you only want to try out the Toronto VPS for a month

    If you register a billing account on our website and open a ticket and include your LET username we can work something out, for $6 or so.

  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep
    edited May 2014

    Profforg said: What's the case to do a storage VPS with high availablity?

    I really have nothing against, but i've seen many benchmark which shows, that OpenStack is slowly and have less availablity than custom solutions. And for storage server, i think OpenStack will just make it a slow shit)

    OpenStack is a high level framework that works with various components such as KVM hypervisor, distributed storage system, etc. It would be impossible for OpenStack to slow anything down by itself since it doesn't actually do any of the work.

    The virtual machines run on top of a distributed storage system, where virtual machine images are divided into blocks and each block is replicated across two random storage nodes in a fixed-size storage cluster. If a VM compute node fails, your data is not lost since there is replication, and the VM will be automatically evacuated to another compute node.

    There is a disk performance penalty due to the distributed storage (separate from OpenStack; again, OpenStack is completely irrelevant in this picture), but other than that the VM are just like VM in any other case running with KVM through libvirt, OpenStack just comes in during failures to evacuate, or during maintenance to live migrate.

    Similarly, for networking, OpenStack just makes calls to OpenvSwitch when it needs to adjust the virtual networks or if a network node fails.

    So, OpenStack doesn't decrease performance, it acts as manager to bring high availability and integrate cloud features like snapshots and floating IPs.

  • catdingcatding Member

    Does private VPN allowed?

    Thanked by 1perennate
  • hbjlee17hbjlee17 Member, Host Rep

    @catding said:
    Does private VPN allowed?

    yes

  • catdingcatding Member

    that's great.
    will try it later.

    @hbjlee17 said:

    Thanked by 1perennate
  • jimmyvujimmyvu Member

    I love any pay-as-you-go provider :D

    Thanked by 1perennate
  • fitvpnfitvpn Member
    edited May 2014

    Toronto? Test IP shown USA Cogent communication or please provide a correct test IP as use on your VPS Which DC in Canada?

    Thanked by 1perennate
  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep

    fitvpn said: Toronto? Test IP shown USA Cogent communication or please provide a correct test IP as use on your VPS Which DC in Canada?

    The test IP is correct. As stated in the order information, virtual machines are provisioned out of Cogent datacenter in Toronto. The address of the datacenter is 245 Consumers Rd 300 Toronto ON M2J 1R3

  • publiopublio Member

    It looks like Toronto is a Cogent-only network. Is that right?

    What does it mean for your Storage 250 GB plan to have 512 MB of RAM? Can't I mount this as a disk on another VM?

    Thanked by 1perennate
  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep
    edited May 2014

    publio said: It looks like Toronto is a Cogent-only network. Is that right?

    Yes. @hbjlee17 selected datacenter, we did some ping/traceroute tests from various locations after we set up servers and found that the network actually performs similar or better than the few other Toronto providers/datacenters we looked at.

    publio said: What does it mean for your Storage 250 GB plan to have 512 MB of RAM? Can't I mount this as a disk on another VM?

    The Storage 250 GB plan is a VM. We are considering supporting attachable volumes either through OpenStack Cinder or some other platform, but for now we find the VM's with large disks are suitable as you can install NFS or SFTP server on them.

  • hiphiphip0hiphiphip0 Member
    edited May 2014

    Do you have gzip enabled on the test file?
    The download speed is a little too fast from my location,

  • derpderp Member

    Hey there, I don't know much about OpenStack but it looks nifty. This might be just what I'm looking for in the next month or so, then again perhaps not. Just a few questions….

    1. Can I create running nodes with internal IP addresses only?
    2. Can I create multiple vlans for different kinds of nodes? Eg, NET_WWW, NET_APP, NET_DB.
      2.1 If so, does the infrastructure support communication between vlans? NET_WWW can talk to NET_APP nodes (on specific ports only via respective network firewall rules), etc.
    3. Can I switch a public address between nodes through an API call?
    4. Assuming I reserved a public IP address, am I able to set up reverse dns for it? (portal or ticket doesn't matter)
    5. Have you any rough figures for the time it takes to detect and evacuate everything from one host to another?
    6. Any plans to roll this out to your other datacenter too?

    Maybe a really quick diagram will help to show what I'm looking to do…

             PUBLIC_IP                          
         Failover to lb02 in                    
        event of lb01 failure,                  
          maintenance, etc.                           
                  +                             
                  |                             
    +-----+------+++------+-----+               
    |     +------+ +------+     |  NET_LB       
    |     |lb01  | |lb02  |     |  10.60.1.0/29 
    |     +------+ +------+     |               
    +-----+------+++------+-----+               
                  |                             
                  |                             
    +--+-----+-+-----+-+-----+--+               
    |  +-----+ +-----+ +-----+  |  NET_WWW      
    |  |web01| |web02| |web03|  |  10.60.1.8/29 
    |  +-----+ +-----+ +-----+  |               
    +--+-----+-+-----+-+-----+--+               
                  |                             
                  |                             
    +-----+------+++------+-----+               
    |     +------+ +------+     |  NET_APP      
    |     |app01 | |app02 |     |  10.60.1.16/29
    |     +------+ +------+     |               
    +-----+------+++------+-----+               
                  |                             
                  |                             
    +-+-----+-+-----+-+-----+---+               
    | +-----+ +-----+ +-----+   |  NET_DB       
    | |db01 | |db02 | |de|01|   |  10.60.1.24/29
    | +-----+ +-----+ +-----+   |               
    +-+-----+-+-----+-+-----+---+               
    
    
  • vpnareavpnarea Member

    Do you have any IP ranges that will show up as Canadian on GEO IP check at ip2location.com?

  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep

    vpnarea said: Do you have any IP ranges that will show up as Canadian on GEO IP check at ip2location.com?

    No, not at this time.

  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep

    derp said: Can I create running nodes with internal IP addresses only?

    No, but you can disassociate the external floating IP immediately after creating the node (so basically answer is yes :).

    Can I create multiple vlans for different kinds of nodes? Eg, NET_WWW, NET_APP, NET_DB. 2.1 If so, does the infrastructure support communication between vlans? NET_WWW can talk to NET_APP nodes (on specific ports only via respective network firewall rules), etc.

    We can set up security groups within a VLAN that restrict communication between VMs in different security groups to certain rules. There is currently nothing that allows you to set these security groups from the panel but that is one thing on our todo list. You probably want to wait until we add that.

    Can I switch a public address between nodes through an API call?

    Sorry, not at this time, we will add this ASAP. The panel does support it so it shouldn't be difficult for us to implement.

    Assuming I reserved a public IP address, am I able to set up reverse dns for it? (portal or ticket doesn't matter)

    We should have working rDNS from the panel, it uses mydns-ng and then our actual DNS server pulls the records from there.

    Have you any rough figures for the time it takes to detect and evacuate everything from one host to another?

    Theoretically it would start booting within 60 seconds.

    Any plans to roll this out to your other datacenter too?

    Our other location is with SingleHop, they don't do colocation just dedicated server hosting, so we can't have special setup for OpenStack there.

  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep

    hiphiphip0 said: Do you have gzip enabled on the test file? The download speed is a little too fast from my location,

    The file is random bytes, not zero bytes, so it doesn't matter. gzip should be disabled anyway.

  • sleddogsleddog Member

    After reading, still trying to understand the difference between the storage 512 and the regular 512 (other than the obvious: price and storage space).

    Looks like with the storage 512 I'd get an additional 235GB for an additional $1.94/month.

    Is it not HA, or in some other way different?

    Thanks :)

  • hbjlee17hbjlee17 Member, Host Rep

    it is still HA since all our VM images are stored in distributed storage.

  • hbjlee17hbjlee17 Member, Host Rep

    @sleddog said:
    After reading, still trying to understand the difference between the storage 512 and the regular 512 (other than the obvious: price and storage space).

    Looks like with the storage 512 I'd get an additional 235GB for an additional $1.94/month.

    Is it not HA, or in some other way different?

    Thanks :)

    The storage vm are not meant to be doing anything cpu intensive, so after we setup monitoring, clients who are utilizing a lot of cpu usage would be notified and expected to adjust cpu usage accordingly.

  • sleddogsleddog Member
    edited May 2014

    hbjlee17 said: it is still HA since all our VM images are stored in distributed storage.

    hbjlee17 said: The storage vm are not meant to be doing anything cpu intensive

    In my case it would be very non-intensive webserving, but with a library of (rarely-accessed) static files that would be tight on 15 or 20 GB.

    But no big deal, I'll figure out what works.

    Thanks from an east-coast Canadian :)

  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep

    sleddog said: In my case it would be very non-intensive webserving, but with a library of (rarely-accessed) static files that would be tight on 15 or 20 GB.

    Yeah, that is fine on storage VM.

  • jimmyvujimmyvu Member
    edited May 2014

    After give it a try yesterday, here is my initial reviews:

    1. The service works yet there are a lot of "small" issues that need to be fixed.

    2. Toronto and Chicago has different functionality in term of creating and managing VPS

    3. It often takes more than 10 minutes to VM shown up at Chicago if you are lucky (the first VPS I tried to boot up never showed up anyway). Another problem was after shutting down a VPS for a few hours I couldn't start it up there (at "grapping" status for long time -> not sure that's a feature or bug?)

    4. Only Toronto supports ISO installation, creating VM from template requires a SSH key-pair and as I couldn't login as root on Ubuntu using the key it was a problem to me (yet you may feel it more secured, hmm). Booting up from self-created template required a ssh key too though it was not added to the VPS after that?

    Finally, I don't expect it anything as good as DO, however, I hope it can be better from time to time.

    Toronto node BM:
    wget http://freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash && dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync; rm -f test
    CPU model : Westmere E56xx/L56xx/X56xx (Nehalem-C)
    Number of cores : 1
    CPU frequency : 2133.406 MHz
    Total amount of ram : 489 MB
    Total amount of swap : 507 MB
    System uptime : 7 min,
    Download speed from CacheFly: 35.4MB/s
    Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 24.3MB/s
    Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 29.1MB/s
    Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 11.0MB/s
    Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, NL: 8.12MB/s
    Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 4.12MB/s
    Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 5.61MB/s
    Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 21.3MB/s
    Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 17.7MB/s
    Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 32.9MB/s
    I/O speed : 49.1 MB/s
    16384+0 records in
    16384+0 records out
    1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 24.1053 s, 44.5 MB/s

    Thanked by 1kaflo
  • perennateperennate Member, Host Rep

    jimmyvu said: It often takes more than 10 minutes to VM shown up at Chicago if you are lucky (the first VPS I tried to boot up never showed up anyway). Another problem was after shutting down a VPS for a few hours I couldn't start it up there (at "grapping" status for long time -> not sure that's a feature or bug?)

    Automatic provisioning in Chicago is currently offline due to issue with SingleHop dynamic IP allocation system. They say they'll try to fix it tonight, after that it seems like their API has changed a bit so we'll probably have to adjust it and restart.

    The snapshotting in Chicago location is not perfect. Grabbing indicates it is currently taking a snapshot. Did you just shut down the VM (this would be weird since it shouldn't enter snapshot state if it's just shutting down), or did you attempt to snapshot it?

    jimmyvu said: Only Toronto supports ISO installation, creating VM from template requires a SSH key-pair and as I couldn't login as root on Ubuntu using the key it was a problem to me (yet you may feel it more secured, hmm).

    The Chicago should have ISO installation supported via the Manage ISO thing in VM details page. The templates provided are from Fedora, Ubuntu, etc. cloud templates which take in SSH key. We added requirement for key to provision template since some users went ahead and provisioned without key, if you open ticket we'll see if we can change it to both avoid confusion and still allow custom templates (probably just make it require only for our templates).

    For the not logging in, you need to use ubuntu user to login, it should say that if you attempt to login as root.

  • jimmyvujimmyvu Member
    edited May 2014

    perennate said: The snapshotting in Chicago location is not perfect. Grabbing indicates it is currently taking a snapshot. Did you just shut down the VM (this would be weird since it shouldn't enter snapshot state if it's just shutting down), or did you attempt to snapshot it?

    Yes, I did try to snapshot it. I'll wait until everything is fixed in Chicago.

    perennate said: We added requirement for key to provision template since some users went ahead and provisioned without key, if you open ticket we'll see if we can change it to both avoid confusion and still allow custom templates (probably just make it require only for our templates).

    I like the way DO work, user can choose to add or not add ssh-key on provisioning template and once choosing to use ssh-key it'll be add to root authorized_keys

  • sleddogsleddog Member

    jimmyvu said: I don't expect it anything as good as DO

    As I understand it, this service provides actual HA / failover. DO does not. That's a huge difference.

  • jimmyvujimmyvu Member

    As I understand it, this service provides actual HA / failover. DO does not. That's a huge difference.

    Yes, theoritically, now I just hope it work without problems

  • publiopublio Member

    Any reviews on the service?

    I'm interested in more info but the wiki seems to be down.

    Thanked by 1perennate
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