Comments on: Physical vs Virtual Servers

By: etbe

etbe — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:43:07 +0000

nona: If you look at the cost of running your own server in the DC of a major ISP with the amount of money that you spend to get equivalent resources through VPS plans then your savings will not be great (if there are any).

http://www.serverpronto.com/
In a comment on a previous post Shot recommended ServerPronto, they are cheap and I have to wonder how good the support is. All their cheaper offerings have no RAID and I presume that none of their offerings include a KVM or similar functionality (which makes it more exciting than you would like to make any changes to the boot sequence).

The high end ServerPronto plans seem cost effective, if you get one of their high-end servers and split it into a number of DomUs then each one would be slightly cheaper than a Linode plan – it seems that you could save about $70 per month. Of course if you are paid to run the servers then having Linode manage things should save at least an hour a month which makes it cheaper.

By: nona

nona — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 05:12:01 +0000

I still don’t understand the appeal of VPS systems considering the prices.

I’ve found them in general _more_ expensive than dedicated servers (looked at Gandi, SliceHost, Linode vs Hetzner, dedibox, or various other on http://wiki.debian.org/DebianHosting). You can run your own Xen or KVM on your own dedicated server if you must. I think I seriously must be missing something.

Anyone care to enlighten me?

By: BetaH

BetaH — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 12:10:44 +0000

Actually you’re mistaken, Xen doesn’t let you have more than the boot time memory. ever.

By: AlphaG

AlphaG — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 05:49:01 +0000

I think part of the issue between physical and virtual (Xen, HyperV and ESX) is the memory addressing models used by the various hypervisor writers.

I know from experimentation Citrix Presentation Manager runs less efficiently on the virtualised platforms compared to the physical because it starts and tears down many processes constantly which creates memory addressing issues (speed) for the hypervisors. Vmware are addressing this in Ver4 so hopefully some of the integer and other applciations will also perform at almost physical speeds with al lthe potential value adds virtualising can bring