Re: [NMOSUG-L] Renting virtual appliances instead of VPSs?

Wesley, what types of systems do you run your virtual hosts on (# of
cpu's amount of physical ram etc.)?  Seems like you could really get a
lot of bang for your buck going that route at home as opposed to the
closet full of old cobbled systems.

On 4/10/07, Wesley J. Landaker <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Monday 09 April 2007 20:43, Kelly Jones wrote:
> > I rent several virtual private servers (VPSs). These are fun, but take
> > a lot of work to setup right.
> >
> > Is there any place I can rent a virtual *appliance*? EG, a "virtual
> > machine" (vmware/Virtuozzo image) pre-configured w/ a Apache/PHP
> > and/or MySQL and/or tinydns and/or nagios, etc, etc?
>
> You want the "appliance" image, or a service that provides you with hosting
> for virtual machine?
>
> For the former, you can get lots of prebuilt images. For instance:
>
> http://www.enomalism.com/downloads/download-virtual-appliances/
> http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/
> http://virtualappliances.net/downloads/
>
> I use KVM/QEMU for all my own virtual machines. VMware is slightly faster
> than QEMU on CPUs without KVM support. With qemu-img you can convert VMware
> images for use with QEMU or vice-versa, with a couple limitations (e.g.
> driver issues since emulated hardware is different; can't emulate an ARM on
> an x86 with VMware, etc).
>
> I personally find it's easiest to make my own images quickly and easily by
> starting with a clean base image (i.e. an up-to-date minimal Debian stable
> already set up with testing/unstable/experimental pinning) and just
> installing whatever I need on top of that. But see below:
>
> > It might even be cool to get one nano-appliance configured w/ tinydns,
> > another w/ MySQL, a third w/ Apache/PHP, etc and have them all talk to
> > each other.
>
> One downside of most "appliance" images (including ones I usually make
> myself) is that they are NOT "nano" by any stretch. Almost everything is
> built on top of some normal operating system, like a Debian or Slackware
> install (or, worse, something like Windows XP).
>
> But this is also an "upside" since it generally makes them easy to
> administer, configure, and use. For example, a "nano" web server sounds
> great, until you realize that you have to give it files to serve somehow,
> and oh, you wanted to run a rails application, and ... etc ....
>
> --
> Wesley J. Landaker <[email protected]> <xmpp:[email protected]>
> OpenPGP FP: 4135 2A3B 4726 ACC5 9094  0097 F0A9 8A4C 4CD6 E3D2
>
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-- 
James
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