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I'm a 30 year Unix/Linux admin by profession, but I haven't dabbled much in either virtualization or hosting, and it is -- as much as anything -- time to expand my skill set in a new and useful direction.
I'm working through the V tour and wiki, and several questions will occur to me as I go; I'm going to post them all here, rather than spray them out across a bunch of threads, in the hope of not making as much of a mess.
Hopefully, y'all will find them comprehensible, rather than compost.
First: my goal.
I'm going to grab a used HP server, something dual-quad Xeon like a DL180g6, which has up to 8 cores, 192GB of RAM, and 12 3.5" SAS/SATA drive slots on the front in 2U.
My local datacenter, the reknown E-Solutions/WOW in Park Tower Tampa will rent me 2U with power for $100 a month.
So I'll bump the base RAM to 32 or 64GB, and toss in a couple 146GB 15K boot drives in RAID1 for base storage, and set up CentOS 6/64 as a host OS.
(Side note: almost nobody anywhere, ever -- and especially all the Virtualizor copy I read -- *ever* distinguishes host OS from guest OS, and it's *always* important, sometimes verging on critical: why doesn't anyone make the distinction?)
Then I'll install the current Virtualizor, and set up a 'utility' VPS for doing all my "real" work; management, monitoring with cacti, and that sort of thing, since I've been told somewhere that installing other control panels and such on your Host OS is a Real Bad Idea.
Then I'll set up one or more "customer" VPSs for things like email (with Zimbra), CMS (probably Drupal, at the moment, but I need to look at WebGUI again), DNS and other services.
My target is to co-op the box with some friends who need hosting space, and possible a couple of my existing customers who are in the same position. I don't propose to guarantee more than 2-nines uptime for the first year, which will limit whom I might want as a customer -- bsaically, it will be me, and my cellphone. So while I need production-grade software (not, say, HyperVM ;-), I don't need *carrier*-grade.
And that brings me to my first couple of questions:
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KVM seems more flexible on a "what can I run" basis, while OpenVZ seems more flexible from a RAM efficiency basis; I gather I can't run both on the same hardware?
Next: the OS templates for KVM are an order of magnitude larger in size than the OpenVZ templates, and the Xen ones aren't much larger than OpenVZ; say maybe double the size. Why the large discrepancy?
At that point, my next question will be -- since it's the other thing I want to delve into -- how, if at all, will OpenStack interact with Virtualizor? I have the impression that they'll, but also that they might be made to cooperate with work; OS seems about half a layer higher in the stack than KVM/V. Is that a valid appraisal?
Also: the Tour says that V supports "VNC and SSH to your VPS". Does that mean "to the virtualized hardware console of the VPS"? Cause *that* would be noteworthy, and the only thing I can think of about which they'd actually be bragging. But the Tour isn't clear.
Finally, for the first round: I am very fond of using Cacti, Ganglia, and other such monitoring tools to watch things on the machine -- especially bandwidth. I'll want to be able to see IPv4/v6 In/Out for both each individual VPS *and* the physical interface, *from the Host OS*.
Can I do that? Is it set up automatically? If I want that, and some sort of user CP *inside* a VPS image, I assume I have to rebuild the image template to include that sort of thing? How hard is it to rebuild the provided image templates for that?
Ok, that's about 35 questions. Sorry. :-)
If enough of those come back positive, then I'll grab the demo and set it up on this spare box I have here. Once I find all the cables for it. And dig it out of the storage room.
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January 15, 2014, 5:31 pm
