Interested in VMware as a VPS platform

[mlueck]

Greetings:

I have not heard much of anything about vendors using a VMware product to host a VPS service. Usually it is OpenVZ, Virtuozzo, Xen.

I was getting interested in Xen as it has a couple of capabilities I am quite interested in utilizing, however a friend uses a VMware product and says it has the couple of capabilities I am interested in. So, what I am interested in:

1) Being able to remotely attach to the server console, watch the boot process, fix sshd if it should become disabled or otherwise, etc...

2) Do the official Ubuntu Linux distro upgrades, such as from 9.10 --> 10.04 LTS.

Like I said, Xen can do those, and I have heard "a VMware product" can as well. If so, then which one(s)?

Of general interest, we would like to utilize a custom partition scheme for virtual Ubuntu servers... ext4 on the /boot partition and xfs on all others... with a separate /, /var, /tmp, and so on...

If all of that is possible, my last question would be where to find reputable hosting providers using said VMware product to power Ubuntu VPS offerings?

TIA!

Michael Lueck

[cedi123]

I am interested in the same topic. searched the internet for a while but could not find any good vps provider.

regards

cedric

[AndreTheGiant]

1) Being able to remotely attach to the server console, watch the boot process, fix sshd if it should become disabled or otherwise, etc...

You can open the vSphere console and see as a normal console

2) Do the official Ubuntu Linux distro upgrades, such as from 9.10 --> 10.04 LTS.

What do you mean? Ubuntu is a supported distro.

About custom partition you can do as a normal physical server.

Can you share the a command disk (of example for the / fs)... It is possible, but you have to use linked clone with VMware API (it's not available with GUI).

Note that Virtuozzo and OpenVZ are not a real bare metal virtualization product. Thei work much similar than UML and build Linux "instance" inside a Linux host. You can have probably a big VMs number, but you lack of a lot of resources management and control of a real virtualization solution.

Andre

[cedi123]

hi andre

would you know by any chance a provider with the possiblity of having images that grow with your images in terms of RAM, CPU, Harddisk and so on without the need to change the entire image.

regards

cedric

[mlueck]

What do you mean? Ubuntu is a supported distro.

With Virtuozzo, the official Ubuntu upgrade process is not supported. You are stuck at what ever release of Ubuntu you were first imaged at. To "upgrade" you must transfer to another VPS of the desired Ubuntu version.

About custom partition you can do as a normal physical server.

Excellent!

So, are there web hosting providers that provide upon such a VMware offering, and support Ubuntu as well? I have not yet found such, so suggestions / recommendations welcomed!