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Stallion
 
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Milwaukee
 
2009-04-22, 14:15

Anyone ever host anything on here? I've thinking about setting up a CentOS VM to host a website I'll be making in the near future.

I'm curious how this works exactly. In my experiences, virtual machines are significantly slower than a native OS. Can one expect slow performance from the cloud?

I've never really messed around with servers before, so forgive my ignorance. I know our "dev" environment at work is slower than hell and that is 3 virtual machines hosted on a ~5k server. Then, our application servers (jboss) run on a dedicated CPU w/ 16gb ram and they fly.

...and calling/e-mailing/texting ex-girlfriends on the off-chance they'll invite you over for some "old time's sake" no-strings couch gymnastics...
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Gargoyle
http://ga.rgoyle.com
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: In your dock hiding behind your finder icon!
 
2009-04-22, 17:30

Modern virtual machines run at near native speed for most operations, assuming the host is configured correctly.

I have been running my hosting business on virtual machines for 6 months now with no noticable difference from my old dedicated server.

OK, I have given up keeping this sig up to date. Lets just say I'm the guy that installs every latest version as soon as its available!
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Partial
Stallion
 
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Milwaukee
 
2009-04-22, 17:47

Good to know. Thanks!
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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2009-04-22, 18:24

Quote:
Originally Posted by Partial View Post
In my experiences, virtual machines are significantly slower than a native OS. Can one expect slow performance from the cloud?
I can't speak for Amazon's cloud, but modern VMs in general should only run slowly if the host machine is overtaxed. Some cheap web hosting plans, for example, put too many VMs on the same physical box, leading to all of those VMs competing for resources too much. This gets especially bad if any of the VMs run out of memory and start paging to disk. That will slow down everyone on that box tremendously.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Partial View Post
I've never really messed around with servers before, so forgive my ignorance. I know our "dev" environment at work is slower than hell and that is 3 virtual machines hosted on a ~5k server. Then, our application servers (jboss) run on a dedicated CPU w/ 16gb ram and they fly.
There are probably even more differences between the dev VMs and the application server there than you realize. For example, are files hosted locally in the VMs, attached on an external drive, or managed on a SAN? Are there databases and, if so, where are they located? Or is one shared among developers? What are the CPU architectures on each of the machines? Are there load balancing mechanisms in place? Master-slave replications for databases or files? Etc. etc. etc.

At my job, we've long been moving toward having as many production servers actually running on VMs as possible. We just recently crossed the 200 count for VMs managed across several big hardware clusters and the number just keeps rising. VMware's VirtualCenter makes managing these things super-easy. Need more memory or disk space? Just a few clicks away. Want to clone an existing VM? Just a few clicks away. Want to move a VM to a different physical machine? Just a few clicks away. You can also schedule jobs to check the health of and manage your VMs' resources for you.

Virtualization is truly a godsend for IT administration.

Granted, some tasks really do need dedicated hardware. Our database, for example, sits on a few dedicated POWER servers with something like 30 logical CPUs, mountains of RAM, fibre attached storage, and several redundant systems.

But for a general-purpose web server? VMs all the way, baby!

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MCQ
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: NY
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2009-04-23, 00:17

Since it's pay as you go/use, it shouldn't be too costly to just take it for a spin and see if it'll meet your needs.

This page provides some detail on what kind of compute resources are available for the EC2 instances.
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
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torifile
Less than Stellar Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Durham, NC
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2009-04-23, 09:49

So is this service competing with something like linode? Or are they 2 completely different things?
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