remmers
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Running Grex as a VPS
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Dec 2 13:05 UTC 2008 |
Virtualization technology seems to be pretty mature. With software
tools such VMware or Parallels, you can create your own virtual
machine running as a "guest" on some other OS. For example, you
could run a Linux guest on Windows Vista or a FreeBSD guest under
OS X. On a more global scale, Amazon offers its EC2 (Elastic Compute
Cloud) service, where you can create and control your own machine
image running on Amazon's hardware.
A couple of months ago I decided to educate myself on the VPS
(Virtual Private Server) offerings that are out there, partly for
my own edification and possible personal use, and partly to see if
VPS might be a viable alternative to Grex's owning and operating
its own hardware.
I found a company called RootBSD (http://www.rootbsd.net) that
offers FreeBSD VPS's using Xen virtualization technology. Their
virtual machine packages come in various sizes and they charge by
the month - $20/month at the low end up to $120/month at the high
end. The high-end VPS has 2gb of memory, 120gb of disk (RAID), and
a cap of 400gb/month of network bandwidth. That seems roughly
comparable to the resources Grex has now, at a lower price than we
pay our current provider. You get a static IP and full root access.
To see how the service works in practice, I filled out their web
form and took out a subscription to their low-end package. Within
an hour they had set me up with a VPS having 256mb RAM, 10gb of
disk, running a basic installation of FreeBSD 7.0, and with a
dedicated static IP address. The normal way to access the machine
is via SSH, but they also provide a web-based control panel that
includes a virtual console that allows you to do such things as
take the machine off the network and run it in single-user mode.
I put the machine through its paces to see if there were any
limitations to what I could do software-wise as an administrator.
So far I haven't found any limitations. One of the first things I
did was to upgrade the OS to FreeBSD-stable, which involves compiling
and installing the userland and kernel source from scratch. This
went without a hitch. Speed seemed pretty good for a machine with
only 256mb of memory - the "buildworld" step (compiling the userland
software) completed in under two hours with the machine running in
multiuser mode, if I recall correctly.
I've installed several dozen third-party software packages using
FreeBSD's "ports" facility, including Apache, Mysql, and Postfix.
These three services have all been running for some time now without
problems.
Other packages I've installed under FreeBSD (on other machines)
include Drupal, Mediawiki, and the Grex-specific Party and Write
programs. Haven't tackled Backtalk/Fronttalk yet, but I doubt
they'd pose problems.
At one point I managed to break ssh access to the machine by
accidentally deleting the ssh binary. No problem - I logged into
the RootBSD control panel, booted into single user mode, and
recompiled and installed ssh from source via the virtual console.
Sure beats driving over to ProvideNet.
Note that running Grex as a VPS would solve a couple of recurrent
problems with our current setup that has caused Grex to be down
for days on several occasions: Dependence on physical access and
availability of local staff. With VPS, any staff member with web
access could log into the control panel and perform operations that
currently require access to the hardware. A remote console device
such as PC Weasel has been considered as a way of addressing this
problem, but a VPS with a web-accessible control panel would provide
the same functionality at less expense.
My conclusion: Grex should seriously explore the VPS route as an
alternative to owning and maintaining its own hardware. Obviously,
there are various issues that I haven't addressed here that would
need to be looked at before taking such a step. But from a purely
technical standpoint, it seems feasible based on my experience.
Thoughts?
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