From: Matthew Nuzum (matt_at_followers.net)
Date: Mon 23 Jun 2003 - 16:37:31 BST
Hello all, I thought the list could use a little praise… I’m getting ready
to roll out a beta version of our CMS and I wanted to use a
server-partitioning tool so that we could easily deploy an installation. I
wanted to have the flexibility to later move the installation to a dedicated
server or server farm if the installation needed to grow.
Well, using a Pentium 75 with 64MB of RAM as a test bed I installed vservers
running PostgreSQL, Postfix, Cyrus, Apache 1.3.27/PHP/mod_perl/mod_ssl with
no issues.
My host operating system is fully updated install of RedHat 8.0 and the
vservers all run a fully updated, slightly modified, minimal installation of
RedHat 7.3. I created the vservers using the “newvserver” tool and
everything went smoothly. It asked me if I wanted to create a vserver from
an existing vserver, the host operating system or one of a few choices of
redhat operating systems. Because I standardized on RedHat from the
beginning of the development of our app, this is perfect for me. (I realize
there are other good choices… I really love apt-get from debian, and Gentoo
is so slick… But we started with RedHat and sticking with it has had more
benefits than dis-advantages)
Considering the usefulness of this tool so far, I suspect that all my new
servers will be deployed with at least one vserver running on a hardened
install of RedHat. The wheel’s in my mind have spun with the possibilities
for something like this.
Some things I’ve thought of are a single physical server running several
vservers attached to a loop back interface. The physical server would
provide vpn capabilities to windows and linux clients who can only access
resources provided by the vservers over an authenticated and secure channel.
Another idea would be to test the scalability of applications without having
to make a big hardware purchase. For example, one physical server could
provide a virtual database server with several virtual web servers and even
virtual load balancers.
Maybe someone has already figured out a way to do that… If so, I’d love to
hear about those successes.
Thanks for the great tool…
Matthew Nuzum | Makers of “Elite Content Management System”
www.followers.net <http://www.followers.net/> | View samples
of Elite CMS in action
matt_at_followers.net | http://www.followers.net/portfolio/
<http://www.followers.net/portfolio/followers-custom-web-development.php>