<div>Slicehost and Linode both us Xen. You get your choice of distros, potentially multiple installs, and any filesystem configuration you like. Dreamhost uses V-server (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-VServer">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-VServer</a>), which isn't really equivalent. </div>
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<div>Xen addresses at least some of your concerns: you get root, you get to do anything you want to your filesystem, etc. Unlike Dreamhost, there's no automatic elasticity of computing resources use (you get a fixed slice of RAM and cycles, though you can reconfigure how much that slice is), so it's a lot closer to having your own machine. </div>
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<div>My virtualization experiences with Hyper-V and VMWare have been pretty good. I've never used Xen, which is, implementationally, fairly different, I believe. <br></div>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Rob Gubler <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:rgubler@gmail.com">rgubler@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote style="BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; PADDING-LEFT: 1ex" class="gmail_quote">Has anyone used Dreamhost, or a similar provider that offers virtualized servers? I run virtualized OSs (often the latest stable linux kernel release) at work on Dell 1950s and Dell 6850s for network development testing. I've used both Xen and more recently Virtualbox. On both I've ran into some peculiar problems where resources or IO devices would lock up and ultimately required a reboot; sometimes of just the virtualized OS, and sometimes the host. I'd be interested in hearing the experience of other people that have used virtualized hosting from commericial level providers. <br>
<br>On the Dreamhost VPS website (<a href="http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting-vps.html" target="_blank">http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting-vps.html</a>) they don't seem to make any mention of the techincal aspect of how these things work. There is mention of memory scalability but not CPU scalability. What happens when/if we reach the limit of our assigned CPU? Do we get allocated another one? Is there cluster computering going on here that allows Dreamhost to easily reallocate CPU and memory resources to arbitrary virtual machines? <br>
<br>I remember there was one time my host Linux system got itself into an unrecoverable kernel exception. Upon reboot I discovered my virtualized file system was corrupt and the guest OS wouldn't boot. I suppose its possible if I used a different filesystem type I may not have had this problem but I am curios if we're locked into the filesystem of Dreamhosts choosing.<br>
<br>It looks like we wouldn't get root access. This seems bad. What does this mean for our specialized HCoop software/services? Are we locked into a particular OS? <br><br>I'm not sure how comfortable I am moving to a virtualized configuration. I have a lot of reservation regarding the use of virtual machines. I just want to state the obvious that, while there maybe advantadge to us considering the use of a VPS, it does come with its own set of problems.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>-Rob<br></font><br>_______________________________________________<br>HCoop-Discuss mailing list<br><a href="mailto:HCoop-Discuss@lists.hcoop.net">HCoop-Discuss@lists.hcoop.net</a><br><a href="https://lists.hcoop.net/listinfo/hcoop-discuss" target="_blank">https://lists.hcoop.net/listinfo/hcoop-discuss</a><br>
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