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

[Daniel Margolis]

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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux-VServer), which
isn't really equivalent.

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.

My virtualization experiences with Hyper-V and VMWare have been pretty good.
I've never used Xen, which is, implementationally, fairly different, I
believe.
On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 11:30 AM, Rob Gubler <rgubler at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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