Exploring VPS Options

quackweb

Verified User
Joined
Nov 16, 2003
Messages
184
Location
Denver, Colorado
Hello,

Lately we have had a high demand from potential clients for us to offer VPS packages. Since the demand has been so high, we have decided to explore this option. Our question is to those who offer VPS packages already. What VPS software do you use? What is your hardware specs and the max amount of VPS's you will put on those servers? Do you have specific restrictions for each VPS (e.g. limiting CPU resources, memory, etc on an individual basis or equal sharing of resources) or do you allow a free for all (as crazy as that sounds)? Do you have any miscellaneous advice or cautions? Do you find that your VPS clients are fairly satisfied overall or do they have a lot of problems?

Right now, we are looking into using OpenVZ running on CentOS 4.4 and offering all the distros available to OpenVZ. The servers would be Dual Xeons (possibly Quad, not sure yet) each running at 3.0 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, 2 x 500 GB SATA drives in a hardware RAID 1 configuration and of course, the option of a DirectAdmin License free to all of our VPS clients ;) or choose a different control panel for an extra fee.

Any advice, suggestions or comments are welcome as this will certainly help us in making a decision on how we set this up. Thanks in advance!
 
We're looking at using Xen, but will wait till we can get it integrated into CentOS5.

Be sure to check with DA for their VPS license pricing.

Jeff
 
Hi Jeff,

Thanks for your input, we explored Xen a while back and had problems integrating it with CentOS, then again they didn't support CentOS at that time (still not sure if they do). It was like pulling teeth to get it to work so we scrapped the idea all together.

We've been playing with OpenVZ for a few weeks now and so far it has exceeded our expectations as it integrates very easily, does very well under stress tests, and each VPS truly is isolated from the rest as we couldn't get it to affect the others with the proper limits in place.

It looks like we will be using OpenVZ but still would like anyones input on the hardware specifications they recommend. Not sure how many people are hosting VPS's in the DA community so I am not sure what kind of response we are going to get ;).

Also, we know about the internal pricing, we have so many dedicated servers, we qualify for the bulk discount internal pricing, thanks for the hint anyways.
 
No and neither does RedHat (I asked about two weeks ago). They just released the second Beta.

Jeff
 
Hello,

We are using Xen for a few VPS accounts (10 - 15), on two Xeons servers with similar specifications as yours.

We have actually setup the xen host under debian, as we had a lot of troubles configuring it under CentOS.

But we have different guest running Debian , CentOS, Gentoo some of them using directadmin flawlessly.

What we really miss is a control panel to manage all this, enomalism and the xen solutions doesn't really fits us.

Otherwise it is really working great, we have migrated all of our budget servers to Xen servers and the customers seems to be happy.
 
The new CentOS is supposed to have good control functionality (I saw a demo at the recent SCALE event in Los Angeles), but I believe it will require X-Windows. Perhaps someone will quickly write a Webmin module? You :) ?

Jeff
 
Unfortunately, my skills in perl are far too small to write a decent webmin module.
We are using the xen-tools and xen-shell to delpoy and manage the xen hosts, it works quite well until now but it is not "point and click" and requires a lot of human intervention on each setup.
 
Once it's a part of CentOS a lot of admins will start using it; hopefully one of them is already involved in the Webmin community and will write one for us :) .

Jeff
 
I am trying OpenVZ and there is already a Webmin module for it. OpenVZ seems to be a good product from what I have read. Does anybody know of any real reasons not to use it?
 
I am trying OpenVZ and there is already a Webmin module for it. OpenVZ seems to be a good product from what I have read. Does anybody know of any real reasons not to use it?

We are also going the route of Xen and soon ready to deploy it.. Be prepared that xen open source is not well documented and support is almost nill. IMHO this will change soon (because of RH and CentOS support)

That being said I much prefer it over OpenVZ. OpenVZ virtualizes at the application level while Xen does at the kernel level. With Xen you can run various Linux kernels (2.6 and 2.4) and even windows (if running as paravirtualized mode with a processor that supports it) With OpenVZ (virtuzzo) you are limited to 2.6 kernels and only same OS based upon the root node.

With Xen going to be in CentOS5 (RHEL5) it is going to make life much easier to integrate.

We also could not get a stable version with CentOS 4.4 and at the moment are using Fedora 6.
 
Yes it does, not a good option for a hosting provider. All of the existing web based solutions IMHO stink. Looking into rolling our own.
How about creating it as a Webmin module, and donating it to the community :) ?

Jeff
 
With OpenVZ (virtuzzo) you are limited to 2.6 kernels and only same OS based upon the root node.

Hello,

This is not completely true. With Virtuozzo or OpenVZ, you are only bound to the Linux family. You can have a FC2 OS on the hardware node, yet your VPS's can be FC1,2,3,4,5 Centos 3,4 Suse, RHEL. The only requirement is that the VPS is still linux. Virtuozzo unlike OpenVZ also comes with application templates and man other features not in the free OpenVZ. The OS footprint on both OpenVZ and Virtuozzo is about 55M per VPS.

There is also the options of the P2V utilities, the 0 downtime migration, no hardware dependancies at all. I can move a VPS from an athlon 32 bit to a quad core Intel system with no conflicts.

The only real solution for the hosting world is Virtuozzo or OpenVZ when it comes to a question of performan and ease of use in virtualization. I hope this clears up the miss information.
 
We have finished with our preliminary OpenVZ tests are were very pleased with the results. We were able to run a variety of Linux operating systems based on RedHat with no problem. The host system was CentOS 4.4 and we tried all of the CentOS 4.x versions, Fedora Core 1-5, along with the most recent version of White Box. Some of the older versions of Fedora needed to be tweaked but we did get them to work. We also had to create our own in house templates since OpenVZ only has templates of the more recent versions of those operating systems. It wasn't too difficult as we just changed a few settings in the templates that came with OpenVZ.

Although we are happy with the OpenVZ findings, we are going to wait until CentOS 5 is available since it will be integrated with Xen. This way we can test Xen fully integrated with CentOS and see how it compares with OpenVZ.

I know that RedHat just released RHEL 5 Wednesday but does anyone know if DirectAdmin works on RHEL 5? Any idea when DA will officially support RHEL 5? We would love it if someone could post their experiences if they have done this yet.

Thank you for all the opinions in this matter so far, especially to Jeff who as always been a great contributor to the DA community!
 
I know that RedHat just released RHEL 5 Wednesday but does anyone know if DirectAdmin works on RHEL 5? Any idea when DA will officially support RHEL 5? We would love it if someone could post their experiences if they have done this yet.[/quote]
JBMC, the company which develops DirectAdmin, will compile DA on CentOS5 as soon as it becomes available. They'll release it for both CentOS and for RHEL5 as soon as it works.

(CentOS is a free-as-in-beer distribution of the Open Source free-as-in-speech RHEL source code.)

Thank you for all the opinions in this matter so far, especially to Jeff who as always been a great contributor to the DA community![/QUOTE]

You're welcome <blush>.

Jeff
 
Hi guys,

I know this is not directly related to DA, but we are trying to get some VPS going with Xen and DA, and we keep getting these errors, which seem to only get logged when there is network activity across eth0. We have replaced memory and nic:

Code:
Badness in __skb_trim at include/linux/skbuff.h:982
[<c0294945>] llc_rcv+0x2f5/0x330  
[<c02867d2>] netif_receive_skb+0x2b2/0x320 
[<c0250e6c>] netif_poll+0x42c/0x670  
[<c0286b1d>] net_rx_action+0x13d/0x220  
[<c0125fd2>] __do_softirq+0x92/0x130 
[<c01260f5>] do_softirq+0x85/0xa0  
[<c0106e7c>] do_IRQ+0x3c/0x70  
[<c0239c12>] evtchn_do_upcall+0x92/0x100  
[<c0105635>] hypervisor_callback+0x3d/0x48  
[<c0109d20>] safe_halt+0x20/0x50 
[<c010305c>] xen_idle+0x2c/0x60  
[<c010311b>] cpu_idle+0x8b/0xe0   
[<c03ae93b>] start_kernel+0x1ab/0x1f0  
[<c03ae300>] unknown_bootoption+0x0/0x1e0

Does this look familiar to anyone or could point me in the right direction ?

Thanks :)
 
Last edited:
No idea.. best option is to post this on Xen's mailing list at

http://lists.xensource.com/

Hi guys,

I know this is not directly related to DA, but we are trying to get some VPS going with Xen and DA, and we keep getting these errors, which seem to only get logged when there is network activity across eth0. We have replaced memory and nic:

Code:
Badness in __skb_trim at include/linux/skbuff.h:982
[<c0294945>] llc_rcv+0x2f5/0x330  
[<c02867d2>] netif_receive_skb+0x2b2/0x320 
[<c0250e6c>] netif_poll+0x42c/0x670  
[<c0286b1d>] net_rx_action+0x13d/0x220  
[<c0125fd2>] __do_softirq+0x92/0x130 
[<c01260f5>] do_softirq+0x85/0xa0  
[<c0106e7c>] do_IRQ+0x3c/0x70  
[<c0239c12>] evtchn_do_upcall+0x92/0x100  
[<c0105635>] hypervisor_callback+0x3d/0x48  
[<c0109d20>] safe_halt+0x20/0x50 
[<c010305c>] xen_idle+0x2c/0x60  
[<c010311b>] cpu_idle+0x8b/0xe0   
[<c03ae93b>] start_kernel+0x1ab/0x1f0  
[<c03ae300>] unknown_bootoption+0x0/0x1e0

Does this look familiar to anyone or could point me in the right direction ?

Thanks :)
 
Back
Top