Virtualized web server

[Peter Sabaini]

On Monday 24 November 2008 15:59:06 Emil wrote:
> 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?

No, rsync will only transmit changed blocks (its pretty smart about that too, 
read eg. http://www.samba.org/rsync/tech_report/)

No need to patch :-)

peter.

>
>
> Regards Emil