Woah, here’s a VM that allows me to load “Live CDs” (e.g. Knoppix) into a VM instead of bothering with burning and rebooting. Sweet!
I hadn’t tried VMWare since I was running Windows 98, I’m really impressed with the variety of free VMs available to run with VMPlayer. Thanks Jeff!
Oops, I forgot to link in my above post: http://www.vmwarez.com/2006/02/livecd-player-virtual-machine.html
PWills – thanks so much for the pointers. I’m going to try to find a newsgroup somewhere and hopefully find someone who can help me build a case to present to the company for reducing our costs and increasing our pipe to the internet all at the same time. Thanks to you I have some avenues of investigation.
Again, thank you very much.
Matt
I wish you the best of luck with CT. We used them for several years for our dedicated servers. After nothing but continual problems, server crashes, network outages, power problems, etc, we switched most of our servers to a different provider about 10 months ago and are so happy to have our servers out of CT’s data centers. Not a single data center related issue since the move. At CT, it was almost a weekly occurrence. We still have a few servers at CT and not surprisingly, those are the only servers that we have issues with. YMMV.
To their credit, they do have good support and their Control Center is very handy. And for small websites, shared hosting, etc they are probably pretty decent. But for dedicated servers…not so much.
Mark Hoffman,
Sorry to hear about your issues with CT. I am the president of CT and have never had a customer complain of issues you stated. Can you send me your contact information or call into the CT number? If there are issues like you stated occuring, I would like to get details and find out what we can do to solve.
@Auras - you could try to redirect from https://example.com to https://example.hosting.com , but as a key part of the SSL handshake is the client verifying that the certificate matches what the user typed into the browser, you’d either:
You could easily (and without penalty) bounce from http://example.com to https://hosting.example.com (note the first was non-SSL); because a bunch of websites don’t really need server authentication or security for most of their operation, this might actually be acceptable (what do most corporate sites use SSL for? Could it be outsourced or handled externally (for eg, PayPal, Windows Live ID, etc?))
You’ll get better virtual server performance on a RAID 0, RAID 1, or RAID 1+0 array than you will with RAID 5.
This has been very interesting reading as I just recently started to play around with virtualization (and I love it). My understanding is that the ISA Server only handles http requests, what if I wanted to access all ports in my virtual machines through one IP? Is it at all possible (without Virtuozzo and the likes)?
Any comment or pointing me in the right direction welcome.
My 2 cents…
Solaris 10 offers virtualization with very little overhead. Vmware consumes much CPU and memory… but Solaris 10 uses a new technology, called Containers (aka Zones), that shares the same kernel and you can run 100’s of virtual servers on the same machine with little impact. There are relatively few hosting providers for SUN Solaris, one that I know is good and relatively inexpensive is Hosted DB… hosteddb.com. It is worth it to check out using SUN Solaris instead of Windows with Vmware for running virtual servers.
Cool post, I have a setup like this too, runs my Windows servers and some Trac/svn JumpBoxes.
I use 64bit Gentoo as the host, it’s a headless minimal install with VMWare server Squid in reverse to fix the IP sharing problems.
All free, works a treat, and it’s fast too.
Stonie.
I’m using nginx as my reverse proxy these days. It’s a very small, incredibly high performance open source web server from Russia. The thing literally screams - I have it proxying through to a couple of other web servers (Apache + mod_python, just because that’s the easiest way to serve Python sites without worrying about keeping FastCGI procceses alive). It consistently uses just a few MB of RAM whether proxying or serving static files directly.
Congrats on a successful move.
You guys might want to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 with Windows Server Virtualization when it’s available (WSV is supposed to be available 180 days after WS2008 ships, the CTP is available now: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2007/09/24/windows-server-virtualization-community-technology-preview-now-available.aspx ). Windows Server Virtualization puts the parent operating system in a hypervisor mode which makes more efficient use of hardware and allows for better use of the physical hardware by VM’s. I’m not sure, but I’d bet it allows you to use 64bit VM’s, too.
This seems like a good tradeoff if you really want to partition things so you each get your own server. You pay a performance penalty (compensated for by smokin hardware), and you have to keep 3 operating systems patched and maintained, but you don’t have to worry about Phil screwing up your awesome Perl scripts with his yucky .NET code (sorry, that just slipped out).
Did anybody notice the ‘great deals’ link is broken?
Also I think iptables is an open-source equivalent contender to ISA
I had one hell of a time trying to figure several virtual machines on my Core i7 950 rig. I used vmware but it took me days and days to get it working properly. The happy side? I have 4 virtual machines working right now, each with 1gb of ram memory allocated. Real nice. No pain no gain.
George of http://webhostingforacent.com/?v=g