Posts tagged FreeBSD
Example cost: Virtual Private Cloud on VMware
Sep 4th
In the last 6 months, I have helped multiple customers achieve their dream of a virtual machine environment built for them exclusively, but with abilities to control their virtual machine setup, configuration, turn up, tear down, etc. These dedicated infrastructure environments are in the ipHouse data center.
This isn’t ‘cloud computing’ as many people think of it (thanks to Amazon EC2 and the like), but it is pretty close to that vague definition, and with far more control available in terms of everything-vm-wise.
What do I mean? With this virtual private cloud, a customer can set up 3 Ubuntu systems, 2 Windows Server 2003, 1 FreeBSD, and 7 Windows Server 2008 systems. There really isn’t anything novel about this (again, reference Amazon EC2 and the like).
What is novel is that the customer can configure these VMs as they wish. Disk space allocation, partitioning, memory configurations, number of vCPUs. Basically, if you can do it on a physical server – you can do it virtually.
Another differentiating feature is that VMware vSphere 4 supports many operating systems while most public cloud providers offer a very limited number in comparison. This choice alone can be enough to warrant looking at this kind of solution.
No per hour fees, no storage fees (above what the customer has purchased), highly available (if configured to do so), dynamic resource scheduling (if configured to do so), bandwidth fees that are predictable. (see VMare vMotion and Storage vMotion, VMware HA, VMware DRS via website)
I’ll build a configuration example offering shared storage between the VMware physical servers. I’ll be doing some cost estimates for the per month fees. These estimates will be high and are purely shown for example. You would want to contact ipHouse Sales to get a real idea for the costs involved.
Linux Sucks! – a presentation
May 9th
Over at Bryan Lunduke’s blog is a presentation on why Linux sucks. No no, no operating system or distribution bashing, he isn’t from Microsoft, and he isn’t arrogant, snarky, or rude throughout. He is able to bring up a topic that causes a lot of fervor – Linux distributions have issues. It sucks.
His thoughts revolve around the desktop and lack of software for the mainstream user, problems with this driver not working with that kernel, and other things that are brushed over when persons talk about the ease of a Linux based system.
My view is much more from the server side of things, that’s where I live day to day, but some of the issues brought up during the presentation reinforce my idea that Linux doesn’t belong in my server network.
But a subscript issue is talked about without ever being brought to the forefront – lack of cohesive anything between different distributions. He touches on some of it dealing with package management – Debian packages vs RPM vs package-manager-of-the-week, but misses the rest of the picture with the complete lack of standardization across the distributions (there is mention of discussions about creating this – isn’t that so 10 years ago? 15? Still broken…).
ipHouse releases VMware based server services
Apr 24th
Virtualization, one of the buzzwords flying around the Internet today, is a method of running separate servers (guests) with separate operating systems on shared physical hardware (the host). I wrote a quick summary back in February, 2009 that should help give some context.
Here at ipHouse, we have chosen to use VMware for our virtualization products. We chose VMware because of its reliability, great support for many guest operating systems, and integrated set of management tools for both the hosts (the physical servers) and the guests (the running virtual machines). In fact, ipHouse is an official licensee of the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP), a requirement to sell virtual server services to 3rd parties (and as far as I know, the only authorized hosting provider in Minnesota, though I would love to be corrected).
Dubbed ‘SV’ internally, there are 4 different server editions available.
But before I get into the servers (and their configurations) themselves, I’d like to list the supported operating systems (and Linux distributions), many of which are ready for quick deployment where only the final configuration options need to be entered.
Immediately we support:
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard and Enterprise, 32/64bit
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Standard and Enterprise, 32/64bit
- FreeBSD 7.x, 32/64bit
- Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), 32/64bit
- RedHat Enterprise Linux 5, 32/64bit
These systems are available with and without operating system maintenance handled by ipHouse, and if you choose to maintain your own system(s), we have an interface in place to facilitate your needs for a virtual console that will give you the ability to power on, power off, and reset the system, as well as doing recovery in case of a configuration error.
How does this work? Here is a tutorial I whipped up (with editing help from Ben) using the client tools we will supply.
(and it was fun to make, but really needs a voice over)
Virtualization and you – the business user
Feb 16th
Why virtualize? Better yet, why use virtualized server services for your business?
I’ll try to answer that question in this blog post, though from a service provider point of view, but I’ll try to remove my bias where feasible.
Summary: For many business needs, a virtualized server on a hosting providers infrastucture is very cost effective, very secure, and highly reliable. When those 3 items are combined, the argument to use separate, physical servers becomes moot. Virtualized server services are not for everyone, nor for ever task at hand, but for many, it is the more right solution.
Now that the summary is done, you can can read on for details as to why I think the above statements are true or just head on over to ipHouse and talk to sales and see what we can do for you, or both.
First, virtualization has a few meanings, but for this context, I am talking about the concept of taking a physical server (call it a host) and carving it into many virtual systems (call them guests) running concurrently. Here’s a picture from using VMware atoms to help visualize what I am getting at:
VM -> Host visualization
This allows the ability to spread the cost of a fast and expensive physical server amongst multiple guest systems.
Virtualization and the ISP (part 4)
Oct 20th
The fun is getting going – ordered up the 8 servers as listed in the configuration in my blog post from October 4th, 2008 on October 14th, 2008.
This will give me 8 host systems and one spare on the shelf (I’ll be using it for test deployments and such as well).
Ship date: October 16th, 2008.
Weight: 862lb
Due date: Today! October 20th, 2008. (Dell tracking said Friday the 17th, but obviously that wasn’t correct, but was in Minneapolis at 8:49am and out for delivery)
I have moved one production system over already (one of the POP/IMAP servers) and performance has been excellent. Over the next few days I’ll get 3 more of the host systems online and migrate the other POP/IMAP physical servers over, then tear down the old systems and remove them from the rack(s).
There is one snag holding us back for the web server side of things – a PDF library that was used by our in-house web guy for automatic formating of PDF documents. We’ll get this worked out soon and start that migration as well.
Once I get these initial 10 systems retired and out of the racks, we’ll rack up the other 4 host systems and prep them for the eventual task of migration of our caching and authoritative name servers (4), our SMTP servers (8), and measure again how things are going (performance, power, etc).
Part 4.1 coming soon, with pictures if I remember a camera…
