Dedicated server prices?

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On July 6, 2005 19:48, ted leslie wrote:
> i almost forgot,
> you also have to watch it,
> some hosting places are using a virtual-kernel setup, where you are private
> in OS level but underneath you are sharing the box, unbeknown to you.
> But then again if you dont need to hog a machine .. this might be ok.

The devil is always in the details. What you just described is not necessarily 
a bad thing, as long as it is disclosed up front. In fact, there are some not 
insignificant advantages to virtualization, not the least being that 
migrating a virtual server from one physical server to another is much easier 
than migrating a physical server to another physical server. The overhead of 
something like Xen is so low, in the order of 2%, that it is negligible. The 
ease of migration is compelling enough that I would even virtualize one 
instance of a server on one physical server just to have that capability.

As for "hogging" a machine, you can hog 100% of a virtual server. As long as 
you know what the resource limits are up front, I do not see a problem with 
that. If you have something that is resource intensive, you can always 
specify what your resource requirements are and the hosting provider will 
make appropriate recommendations.

FYI, I am configuring a few Xen based machines right now for hosting so this 
is very topical for me. I have had recent experience with Virtuozzo and 
VMWare ESX Server as well. The former, I would not touch with a barge pole. 
The latter has quite a bit of overhead but it is a true virtual machine where 
the underlying hardware has been virtualized. Its remote management tools for 
the hosting provider are very good. You can install an unmodified x86 Linux 
distro on a VMWaare virtual machine, or for that matter, BSD, or Windows.

Xen does not virtualize the hardware but requires a modified kernel. The rest 
of it can be whatever comes with your distro.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml