Not one, not two but 6 Servers per Server
For the past 2.5 years I’ve maintained a dedicated server for hosting various sites, both of my own and for clients. I’d been running the same box for a while when, in January, I finally decided I needed to upgrade to a bigger, better machine with an OS I could actually patch (the old server was a Fedora Core 5 machine and Yum was borked beyond repair).
For a previous project I had been looking at various virtualisation options for building a small cloud (cloudlette?) for a managed service and had come across KVM which had taken my interest for several reasons:
- It’s free
- It’s the chosen virtualisation platform of Ubuntu
- It’s pretty easy to setup
So when the option arose to build my new dedicated server I actually took the opportunity to build 6 servers all running Ubuntu JEOS:
- vm1 is my own “private” space which runs this site (along with others) as well as being my OpenVPN endpoint and a general hack about space. This is also the only ColdFusion server of the lot
- vm2 has been resold as a VPS to a friend of mine who hosts a few sites.
- vm3 and vm4 are dedicated to individual clients who need a full vm of hosting power.
- vm5 is the general shared host for all of the small sites and freebies I host. This is the only server with FTP access.
- vm6 (aka mx) is my mail relay server which keeps the loads down on the other 5 and also relays mail for various sites / applications.
This setup has a number of advantages – I can keep my high worth clients separate from the little and freebies in terms of resource usage and potential security issues whilst not having to run to the expense of hosting multiple physical servers. I can also manage / patch the servers as a group using Cluster SSH and the rather snazzy virt-viewer app under Ubuntu and I can install specific packages for the big clients without worrying about bloating my own sites.
If you’re interested in running KVM you could do worse than grab yourself a copy of Ubuntu Server and read through the documentation (and the manual) on their website.
Please bear in mind I was able to do this from the initial build – trying to add virtualisation (certainly KVM) to anything other than a clean, updated install is very likely to end in tears!