Virtualized web server

[Emil]

Hakan Koseoglu wrote:
> Hi Emil,
>
> On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 10:54 AM, Emil <listreaderguy at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> I do not know very much about virtualization, I've mainly used it to
>> test web pages on Windows and test new operating systems on my
>> workstation. But now I was thinking about using it on my quite small web
>> server. I don't have very fast hardware, so it might be really stupid.
>> What I like is the idea of having a minimal OS (I don't know if that
>> should be linux or bsd, solaris, or whatever) on my server and then
>> create a virtualbox disk image with my ubuntu web server on it. I could
>> create the image on my workstation and then transfer it to my main
>> server and my backup server. And if anything go bad I can just transfer
>> a new copy of the image from my workstation to the server (and rsync the
>> backup copy of /var/www and mysql db).
>>
>> Is this just a stupid idea, or will this work? I understand I will lose
>> some performance. Does other do this, if not, why?
>>     
> It is not a stupid idea and actually pretty common practice. I'd
> strongly advise you to use a server distribution (i.e., Ubuntu 8.04
> Server LTS) and install all of the security packages (i.e., Bastille
> etc.).
>   
Great, thank you. One thing that would be neat to is to be able to
transfer just the difference of a virtualbox .vdi disk image over the
network. If I would use rsync I guess the whole file would be
transmitted again on every change. Can I somehow "patch" the backup copy
of the file to minimize transfer?


Regards Emil