vps recommendations

[Jean-Michel Dault]

On Thu, 2009-10-22 at 11:23 -0400, Jim Tarvid wrote:
> Looking for recommendations for the software platform to host virtual
> private servers.
> Some of my clients would like shell accounts. I am not enthusiastic
> about giving those out on shared servers.
> People are selling VPSs for less than $10 per month.
> How is that possible?

Most hosting companies use Virtuozzo (commercial) or OpenVZ
(open-source) to create VPSs. It gives each customer their own isolated
environment, CPU quota, Disk quota, without the overhead of full
virtualization solutions like VMWare.

At Revolution Linux, we use OpenVZ, both for development and
production. 

You can run OpenVZ on any machine, from low-end desktops (one of our
techs has 15 VPSs on an old Celeron) up to the high-end servers. No need
for VT extensions or anything special.

For production, our typical server looks like this:
- Standard Off-the-shelf rackmountable Dual Xeon, 8 gigs RAM, with
plenty of hard drive space in RAID. 
- Standard Hardy 8.04.3 LTS, with the linux-image-openvz (in Universe)
- A hundred or so VPSs per server

To the end user, it's just as if they had their own dedicated server.
Each VPS has complete root access, but can't touch the hardware (no
fdisk, reboot, etc), or even see that there are other people or
processes on the machine.

Provisioning is easy: you can build a template, then simply extract the
template in the VZ directory, create a configuration file, assign IP
address and start the VPS. It can be scripted easily. At the office, we
asked our (non-technie) Human Resources director to create a VPS and she
managed to do it without help. ;-)


More info:
http://revolutionlinux.com/Virtualization?lang=en
http://wiki.openvz.org/Main_Page


-- 
Jean-Michel Dault
Technology Architect
jmd at rlnx.com
Révolution Linux inc
http://www.revolutionlinux.com