How are your servers configured

[Rob]

Hi everyone,

I was just wondering what the configuration arrangements were for your network. Do you use dedicated servers or virtual servers or both?

We use the best of both worlds, we have the physical servers and then put VZ environments on top. This does have its advantages as if there is a problem with one environment. Instead of having to take the entire server offline to fix it, all we have to do is transfer accounts to a backup VPS whilst we fix the broken environment and when its fixed transfer them back.

We also have backup VPS's on standby with other providers outside our network so if a network disaster occurs (which is very unlikely) all we need to do is bring them online and the sites are back.

 

[FormiDAV]

Hello,

At the moment we don't do virtualization on our servers. There is some positive sides to virtualization, especially for server applications, however, we prefer to let the technology mature a little before taking the step. We already have security and disaster recovery solutions in place. And we won't invest in major brand virtualization solutions at this point.

What really interests me at this moment virtually speaking, is the Solaris containers (zones). It offers really good features for complete virtual environments (memory, cpu, disk).

For example you can have a partition let's say /etc that is shared between all your zones. all vm can read the default configuration, but when writing to this partition the virtual layer, create a virtual space in which it stores the modified files for each VM. In other words, All common files in the partition exists only once on disk, and modified files are associed to each VM so that they believe the partition is theirs only. I know that at the moment VMWare prevents even read-only shared partitions, because they believe that their VM should act like real Machines (were one partition cannot be mounted twice at the same time)

I see so many applications to our industry But Solaris is not the most user friendly OS, for clients and for customization, so we're waiting to see what will come out of all this

 

[dnstevenson]

We put OpenVZ on every server. All customer's VPSs are in openvz vpss. We also use VPS for all internal systems. We run each app in it's own vps - this makes migrating services to other servers easy - if an app starts taking too many resources, we simply move machines. Backing up and more importantly, restoring each service is a snap if you just dump the entire VPS. It might take more disk space, but the time savings makes it worth it.

Regards,
Dave

 

[ValueSERVER]

I totally agree with Steven. We also use OpenVZ and it works great.

 

[kevins]

We put OpenVZ on every server. All customer's VPSs are in openvz vpss. We also use VPS for all internal systems. We run each app in it's own vps - this makes migrating services to other servers easy - if an app starts taking too many resources, we simply move machines. Backing up and more importantly, restoring each service is a snap if you just dump the entire VPS. It might take more disk space, but the time savings makes it worth it.

Regards,
Dave

OpenVZ is great, wish they support windows by now.

 

[lucas8]

Im totally agreed with Steven..

 

[Marky.GH]

we have OpenVZ on one of our servers and we are loving it

 

[ToFat]

Rob I have to say that I use all of them for different needs and you have to know which one you need.

 

[dimension4]

We use both dedicated and virtual environments also

 

[AutomatedVPS]

configuration

Our boxes are 32GB nodes running Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V.

 

[vexxhost]

We find it's quite unnecessary to virtualize services that don't exactly need to be virtualized. Most of our service servers are redundant so we don't have any problems with hardware failures.