Hi Philip
Viktor's advice really sums it up.
Since this is a network operator's list, I'll dig a little bit more into the network part:
You probably want to invest some time to separate the network, implement QoS, configure firewalls and design for redundancy (also first hop redundancy such as HSRP), especially if you use IP based storage on a shared network, depending on how reliable and secure you want your network to be.
Also if you grant control of the network interface to your clients (be it virtual or not) you probably want to take a look at private VLANs, ARP inspection, IP source guard and DHCP snooping or similar techniques to secure your network and prevent IP address waste.
Bear in mind that you may loose some functionality with such virtualization technologies like IPSec VPNs inside virtual containers ...
Oh and don't forget IPv6 :)
Regards - Mathias
On 4 May 2011, at 11:03, Philip Iezzi wrote:
Hi
As a small web hosting provider we are planning to switch from physical-only servers to virtualization. So far, our favorite virtualization platform is OpenVZ under Debian Squeeze. We might consider running Proxmox as host system but prefer sticking with plain Debian (even though the future of the OpenVZ-kernel is not guaranteed). Our main goals: hardware independency, reliability, maintenance (single kernel virtualization), power efficiency (reduce number of physical servers), cost.
We're looking for a Swiss hosting provider who is actively using such a single kernel virtualization technology. What's your experience with OpenVZ? How about resource separation of containers (VPS)? Have you got any experience running complete containers off a NFS-mounted NAS/SAN? How about performance in a web hosting environment with resource peaks on various servers? We would greatly appreciate if anybody could share his experience with OpenVZ (or similar single-kernel virtualization) and get in touch with us for some consulting.
Thanks. Regards, Philip
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