[HCoop-Discuss] On organizing people to get work done

[Rob Gubler]

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.


On the Dreamhost VPS website (http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting-vps.html)
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?

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.

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?

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.

-Rob
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