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Virtualized Dedi's Which Virt Platform Might be Best?
We've seen it with a few providers, you offer up a dedicated server, but you provision it like a VPS, they get the full node resources and are the only VPS on the box. There are benefits such as being able to move between hardware nodes for failures or upgrades with ease and minimal downtime.
So which VIRT platform seems best suited?
OpenVZ
Xen
KVM
Comments
For your scenario, KVM. Or if you want cross-OS portability, VMWare...
I think @prometeus mentioned he does things this way for his internal servers/some clients?
I believe iWeb's Smart Servers use Xen PV.
KVM should be perfect for that.
Vmware, kvm and xen are your friend here. The real downtime cut is the san coupled with a virtualization stack (to simplify the move) .
If you have to copy / sync terabytes of data your downtime will be high...
@prometeus: could you comment on why/when you would use VMware vs Xen/KVM when you had full control of the physical server?
At the beginning (without san's) it was for better remote control.
We were renting/colocating servers for our hosting business all around the world and most of the cheapiest servers had no remote power/control, so each time the server crashed (and with some combination of hardware/kernel/apache it was too often) we had to wait for the DC people to hard reset, wait for some fsck and so on.
putting the hosting server in a xen domu the server never crashed but the domu (usually apache OOM), even in case of network misconfiguration we gained a console. Upgrade were simpler and more controlled.
Once this was working we started replicating domu hosting servers on another one (using snapshots you can rsync disks live) so that each server was usually running one hosting server and in case of hardware failure we could start the backup on the second domu in minutes using one hour old data. Our clients were happy, less drama and more relax for us.
With san it was even more convenient. you can cut downtime to minutes even in case of full node failure. A few weeks ago one node died, all VM running in that node were automatically started in other nodes and the clients only noticed a hard reboot. The node was repaired the next day...
Every shared server I've had for the last five years has been an OpenVZ container, which is the only container on the server. It just makes things a million times easier. Backups, migrations, resource management, security, etc... Hell, I've migrated 500+ shared hosting clients a few times in the last two years and they never even knew they were migrated.
And you save cash on the license if you're doing externals
It's just $15/m but hey, that's my $15.
Francisco
@Francisco: sorry to be naive, but could you mean cPanel? And can't you transfer the license when migrating?
Right on both
The thing is that a 'dedicated server' license is $30 - $35/m where as a 'vps license' is $15/m.
Francisco
Or in the case of DirectAdmin, it's a difference between $29/month and $5/month.
I have 20 free DA licenses from WSI, I wonder how they manage to get them.
I have over 100.
Check their ID, it's #111. They were one of the first DirectAdmin clients and basically got bulk licenses for pennies.
I'm assuming they simply have a site license for all of their subnets.
It isn't like it costs DA anything
Francisco