vmware for hosting business

[Mr.Yes]

My situation: i'm very tired to have problems with any plesk update and to live with psadump and his overcomplicated attititude. I was really thinking, after 8 years, to sell my hosting business and spend a life without updates, fix, patch, restore etc. Yesterday i was talking of this with a sys admin working with me and his told me: why we don't think about a server with wmware and a Linux distro with Plesk installed? In this way we could do a backup of all
(os, plesk, files, db ...) every hour if we need and this with a simple copy of a single file with all inside. No more psarestore, backup of plesk configuration etc. If we need, for example, to update something we will do a copy of the virtual machine's file before upgrade and if anything goes wrong we have to simply use our copy, that's all. We could also have a spare server where if the one online have some problem, we have to simply copy just one large vmware' file and we are up again in few minutes!

Do the experienced member of this forum think this is a possible way to do this business or not and why?

Thank you all

 

[Ronaldve]

I have been looking into this too and I think this has some potential.

Though the VM software that runs directly on you machine (VMWare ESX server) is not what you would call cheap. And next to that it only supports a hand full of raid controllers that are all at least EUR/USD 200.

There are aother solutions like running VMware Server (so not ESX Server) on a windows 2003 server but this comes with some potential points of failure (like a crashing windows)

I havent had a good look on Xen Source yet.
And there are some other programas like SWsoft's Virtuozzo (runs on a host OS like VMware server)

 

[erhnam]

Look at openvz.org. It's open source and free! I played with it just a while ago and it has everything you need. It's also virtualisation but it will not virtualize the hardware (only the operating system). Benefit is that it is very fast (almost no performance loss!!) Full backups and even snapshots are possible! Highly recommended.

 

[zeki79]

hi there
i runs vmware server on a win2k3 server with 4gb memory.

on the vmware session i have installed a centos4.2 with plesk 8.01 and 4psa bundle and asl kernel.

it runs very well!

performance: its a little bit slower than a normal server, but its better to be secure than fast...

@mr yes: if you need any other infos, msg me..

greets
zeki

 

[Spyder]

Virtualization

Hi Guys...

let me start:

Last 1 year besides work with my ISP I was deploing one large instalation with VMware ESX ( now 3.0.1) and the is very very reliable.. stable and really I love.

@ this instalation I run vmware in 4 nodes with total of 120 GHz of CPU resources and 96 GB of ram in 6 cells unisys ES7000-ONE.

The fun starts if our hardware is full HCL´d for vmware and you have storages (using fibre or iSCSI) the best option is EMC any size ( actualy I using one cx-700) and alocated 800Gb to finish the pre-production project.

But besides the licenses to processors + Storage you must have vmotion, DRS and all toys specialy Virtual Center from vmware to realy use all features like automatic fail-over and HA but all this thinks really custs a lot o $$$$$

One option is use the VMware server, yes there is one version to Linuxes.. I have 2 windows boxes running and not tested the linux version, all problems I have with them are caused from (host) windows crashed, or become iresponsible some times and the only option is an full reboot.

To My ISP I have licenses to virtuozzo easy deploy, templated plesk install in 5 minutes, and integration with HSPc is the way.
To internal tests Vmware server over Windows hosts.. and the description of COPY-to-Restore is exactly and works perfectly.

There is some diferences in this 3 types of virtualization:


"Types of virtualization
Virtualization techniques are getting more and more popular.
They allow to run multiple virtual servers on a single physical machine.
We refer to this virtual servers as virtual machines.
We distinguish between three virtualization techniques:

Hardware-Virtualization (e.g. QEMU , VMware )
Para-Virtualization (e.g. Xen , Denali , User Mode Linux )
OS-Virtualization (e.g. OpenVZ , Linux-Vserver, Sun Solaris Containers )

This definition is not suitable for all discussions about virtualization.
Also some overlapping between the three virtualization techniques is possible.
The three techniques shown above differ not only in the kind of virtualization,
but also in the provided features. Virtualization is used for different reasons,
and necessary features vary depending on the purpose of an virtualized
environment. All techniques have different pros and cons."

One good point to read about is on wikipedia.



Thank´s

 

[tnats@]

What about Virtuozzo? They have a template built in that with one quick command will install a full Plesk server. Very cool stuff.

 

[zeki79]

virtuozzo costs too much for me... dont know how is the speed with it...

 

[ali@datavision]

Virtuozzo seems to be the way to go.
you can get a virtuozzo license with a managed server for around $30 per month additional to the server cost.
Vmware ESX server is ideal if you have mission critical production servers and have an IT budget behind you to support it.
Vmware Server is not recommended unless you really want to build a dev or test environment. It is there to compete with MS Virtual Server but is much much better.

 

[sieb@]

I've been running our hosting environment on VMWare Server since last winter when I offloaded everything to servers at The Planet. I have three servers running on a Dual 2.8Ghz Xeon with 3 gigs of ram and a RAID5 with 600gigs of space. Things have been running fine, though I am planning on rolling over to an Opteron board with 4+ gigs of ram so I can load more VMs.

I wouldn't recommend ESX unless you have the infrastructure to support it (SAN/Fibre), otherwise its a waste of money. For our needs, GSX (now just VMWare Server) was enough, and I like the benefit of being able to manage everything within Windows. Makes it easier when I eventually transfer control of it to someone else.

Whenever I need to make updates, I take a snapshot of the system, then do the update. If it bombs, I just revert to the snapshot and try again. I also make a copy backup of the server once a month in addition to PSAdumps that I can quickly restore to a clean base system that's already setup.

I highly recommend it over running white boxes.

 

[faris]

I'm surprised there are only 8 comments in this thread - I'd have thought that virtualisation - especially with a free tool like VM Server - would be massively popular in the hosting arena.

I'm about to take the plunge with VM Server but I noticed that disk performance is extremely slow compared to when running the same test directly on the host. (I'm using bonnie++ and a few others).

I am splitting the file into 2Gb chunks though and this bothers me. Do I really still need to do this for Centos 4.4?

Thanks,

Faris.

 

[zeki79]

hes
i use vmware server with centos4 since 1 year and it runs well.

yes, the speed is not so high as on a real server, but its ok for me.

greets
zeki

 

[faris]

Thanks for the input Zeki.

I've been thinking and really it is CPU and memory performance that is probably most critical in my case. I expect disk performance would be extremely critical for massively database oriented applications, but for me it is spamassassin and mod_security that take most of the load and they tend to be more cpu based (though of course they do use the disk).

My new system is much more powerful than the old one so I'm hoping for a performance increase despite oing down the vm server route.

Faris.

 

[breun]

I'd go with OpenVZ (free) or Virtuozzo (non-free, based on OpenVZ) if you want some nice GUI tools etcetera.

 

[atomicturtle]

In reference the 2G file limit, ext3 now supports larger files (up to 2TB now I think). That change went in around FC3 I believe, and is definitely supported in CentOS/RHEL 4.

 

[faris]

Thanks guys. I did a test and I'm certainly not having any problems in the 64-bit Centos with files larger than 2Gigs when it comes to tar -cvzf type operations so I think this is the way to go.

I really think that splitting the virtual disk into 2Gb chunks is one of the main reasons why disk performance is so poor so this is really excellent. I'll do some tests later if I can.

I had a look at OpenVZ and yes it looks excellent but i was kind of put off by the relative complexity of the install, the requirement for a custom kernel and so on. In contrast I'm delighted with the simplicity of VM Server, its configuration options, its remote management and so on - and of course the ability to run the same thing on my desktop if the need arises.

Faris.

 

[breun]

Complexity of the install? Have you checked the instructions lately? Just drop in an openvz.repo file in your yum config dir and you're ready to install all the components (including kernel) using yum. Easy as pie! Check out the Quick installation document on their wiki for step-by-step instructions.

You also need to re-run the VMWare configurator when you upgrade your kernel and OpenVZ's vzyum tool is great when you want to upgrade all your virtual machines at once (no need to log into every one of your VM's).

 

[faris]

Really? I missed this. I'll look again.

I do think some projects could do with better docs or at least better laid out websites to make things a bit more user friendly.

Mind you, I have to say that vmware's website is also quite user-hostile.

Faris.

 

[breun]

I think OpenVZ's wiki is actually pretty good. The link to the Quick installation is found on their home page, so not a lot of digging is required to find that one.

 

[faris]

Well, I had a look and it is kind of incomplete and still scary. I think I have read this before.

I think I'll try installing it in a VM to see if I can virtualise a VM (I'm expect I won't be able to but it will be fun to try).

Faris.

 

[breun]

You're going to install OpenVZ in a VM?? I'm not sure if virtualisation works inside another virtual machine...

If you have a testing box I'd just try it out for real. Last time I tried it it all just worked, but we don't use virtualisation in production yet.