Ed Miller's picture

Hi All,

I love Turnkey Linux.  In fact, I think so highly of it that I intend to use the Drupal appliance as the base for converting my company's 200+ public websites from Windows to Linux.  The one fly in the ointment for me is finding an enterprise grade yet cost effective infrastructure on which to house the appliances which also has support.  

vSphere with all of the bells and whistles is too cost restrictive, XenServer also has cost restrictions, as well as a shared storage requirment for live migration and other functions.  I have seen OpenVZ mentioned here which is the open source version of Virtuozzo containers.  OpenVZ seems like it may be viable, but again my CTO would require a support option which leaves Virtuozzo.

Has anyone used\experimented with Virtuozzo conainers?  Heck, I'd be happy with some feedback regarding OpenVZ as I believe the technologies are very similar if not identical.  I'm curious as to the performance obtained, issues observed, etc.  Also of concern is that the commercial version requires an RPM-based base OS install.  What kind of issues could I\would I be looking at running Turnkey in this environment?

Thank you in advance for any information or advice you may be able to lend.

Regards,

Forum: 
Jeremy Davis's picture

Have a read here. So you are on the money there.

Personally I love OVZ as it is extremely light weight and resource friendly. For example on a current server I have running (it's actually old desktop hardware running ProxmoxVE - more about that below) I have a number of TKL OVZ VMs: TKL LAMP (only serving a few basic html pages) 4MB of RAM; TKL MediaWiki appliance (big amount of info) 232MB; and TKL Fileserver with over a terabyte of files 26MB. These all idle at 0% CPU usage and in my useage scenario (generally low load) generally don't spike above 40-50% CPU. In fairness these are all TKL v2009.x based; v11.x (based on Lucid) will most likely use a few more resources. For my uses I find the performance is basically what you'd expect from hardware with similar resources (as your VM). I haven't actually run any tests to confirm this although you'd probably find benchmarks and comparrisons online if you look. Whilst it is not good practice it is also really easy to over allocate resources if you wish to squeeze every last bit of juice out of your hardware.

As for the Virtuozo implementation under Red Hat/CentOS environment, I see no reason why that should effect anything beyond maintenance (ie maintaining Red Hat/CentOS alongside a number of Ubuntu/Debian based VMs - not really a biggie IMO).

As for OS have you considered ProxmoxVE? It is an open source Hypervisor OS with commercial support available. One of the highlights of PVE IMO is the support for both OVZ and KVM virtualisation technologies. AFAIK it is one of a kind in that regard. I find it increadibly flexible in a mixed IT environment with TKL (and other Linux OS if required) running under OVZ and Windows running under KVM. It also includes quite a functional WebUI for day to day administration (although some advanced tasks require CLI interaction, but that is easy enough as SSH is enabled by default). Not that it makes a lot of difference IMO PVE is built on Debian Stable (ie Lenny) so you are only dealing with one style of Linux (in my experience, for the purposes of basic admin/maintenance Debian & Ubuntu are so close). The beauty of it being open source means that you can download the full product and give it rigorous testing before you need to financially commit to it. I would highly recommend you have a look. TBH the level of support via the mailing list and the forums (even without a support contract) has been fantastic in my experience and there is a wealth of information regarding setup and troubleshooting on the PVE forums.

Ed Miller's picture

After posting my question I started doing a lot of research into other alternatives, which included Proxmoxve.  I intended on posting a followup regarding that very solution so I feel much better about my initial reaction to that product.

So would the TKL Drupal appliance run effectively in Proxmoxve via an ISO install, or would it require a different approach?

Again, thank you for the reply, and thank you for helping produce such a stellar product. 

Adrian Moya's picture

And have 6 tkl appliances running without any problem. Take a look at this thread were we discussed the problem. There's a script to convert the tkl isos to openvz templates and they work flawless in proxmox. If your not in a rush, this method is going to be used to produce official openvz templates for the project, so you'll have what I call a dream scenario: Proxmox-VE + TurnkeyLinux OVZ templates. 

Ed Miller's picture

Excellent!  (And that thread is making a lot more sense now; I had perused it earlier but wasn't catching on).

A bit labor intensive, but definitely seems worth the effort.  I'm going to give this a shot and see what happens.

Thank you both again for the feedback and information.

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