kers7754 Posted October 13, 2011 Share Posted October 13, 2011 Is anyone using Citrix Xen Server (or any other virtualization) for running virutal servers on a single box? I was thinking about running a seperate virtual server for each of the following services on my main server: WHMCS MSSQL server Mail Server Windows shared hosting Linux hosting Any suggestions about doing this? Thanks, --Jeff 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nlvl Posted October 13, 2011 Share Posted October 13, 2011 Xen is ok but can come to major issues, we use KVM for our cloud network and runs flawlessly! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
othellotech Posted October 13, 2011 Share Posted October 13, 2011 The obvious question(s) are 1. is the machine going to be powerful enough to do all of that - my experience is that some of those need dedicated servers all to themselves 2. what _exactly_ are you expecting to achieve by virtualising ms-sql and windows onto separate VM's ? etc As to "can it be done" - yes, whether you'd want to, or if it's a good idea only you can determine. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tomdchi Posted October 13, 2011 Share Posted October 13, 2011 Ditto what othellotech said. We have many servers in a pooled Xenserver environment. I would not recommend running anything production in a stand alone box since you have no fail-over. One thing goes wrong on the server and all your vm's are down. Your going to need a pretty good bit of horsepower and ram to run all the vm's you list. I am a big Cpanel fan. Look at using WHM for the linux hosting and Enkompass for Windows and see where you can combine some of the items on your list. We only have problems with Xenserver during an upgrade but once you have it setup properly its rock solid. The latest version 6.0 is supposed to take care of the upgrade problems. We haven't upgraded yet so we will see. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kers7754 Posted October 13, 2011 Author Share Posted October 13, 2011 (edited) Originally I went out and bought 5 1u blade servers and we wanted to separate each service to it own physical box. Once we found out how much colocation costs as a function of power (amps) combined with the fact that we are starting out with only a handfull of paying customers, the guy at the data center suggested we look into creating VM. He said that on a decent box (quad core with 16 GB of ram and a 2 TB of disk space), we could create 3 VMs and run each service on it own virtual box. And then, for example, as soon as the mail server gets busy or runs out of space, we could migrate that virtual box to a physical box. I could put everything on a single physical box but I like the idea of seperation as long as migration from a VM to a physical can be as simple as the guy at the data center said it might be. Any comments? Edited October 13, 2011 by kers7754 spelling :) 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tomdchi Posted October 13, 2011 Share Posted October 13, 2011 You didn't mention anything about the type of storage you are planning on. The recommended setup for Xen is to have at least two local drives in raid 1 and these drives are for Xenserver only. VM's would be placed on some kind of fibre or iscsi SAN. SAN's can be really expensive but if you can't afford one you can build your own. We have tested Nexentastor as a iscsi SAN and it is awesome. We ended up using it as backup storage in case our main SAN goes down. If we ever need new primary storage we would seriously consider using it. It is possible to run VM's on local storage but that is not something I would want to try to do in a production environment. I would check around at different colo's. Our colo has deals for quarter racks with 8 amps of power and 1meg top tier bandwidth for $250 a month. Thats a pretty smokin deal I think. I have never tried to take a VM and put it on a server as the guy at the colo told you. I would think it is possible its just something I have never run across. One thing you must do is plan for equipment failure because it WILL happen. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kers7754 Posted October 13, 2011 Author Share Posted October 13, 2011 We were planning on running on a single 2TB Raid 5 hard drives (which is 4 500 GB SATA 7200 RPM) with 16 GB memory and 4 cores. Do you think it would be better to have 2 physical servers? Maybe 1 for WHMCS and the Xen Sever which can run on 2 SCSI 72 GB drives (15K RPM RAID 1) and the second is the server described above for the VM machines? Thanks for all the information... I will make sure it is possible to image a physical box from a VM. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WebGuyz Posted October 15, 2011 Share Posted October 15, 2011 Check out the WHMCS addon for provisioning a xenserver (they have xen source as well) from http://www.servarica.com. I just went thru an install where they logged in and set it up for me. That was the last piece of the puzzle needed to use xenserver for hosting, a provisioning system tied into WHMCS. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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