As an active system administrator, part of my job is determining which systems require decommissioning due to the age of the OS or for other reasons. When readying a server for retirement, we’ll take the opportunity to move and upgrade the services running on that server. Often, we are then left with a perfectly good piece of hardware that has already been paid for and is still a valuable asset. A great way to leverage this equipment is virtualization- specifically, OpenVZ.
Oftentimes, servers are underutilized- especially when it comes to development work, or when running lower impact applications. Rather than deal with multiple users on a system, apache virtual hosts for multiple websites, worrying about secure file access, or one user or customer hogging a huge amount of resources, we have found that creating multiple virtual servers using OpenVZ is an ideal solution. I won’t delve into OpenVZ deployment other than to briefly note that on our CentOS and RedHat servers, installation is as simple as adding the correct repository and installing via yum (see here for more info). Once installed, a quick reboot into the new kernel and you are ready to roll. We are running 45-50 virtual servers (VEs, or containers) on one of our 2 QUAD core CPU, 8GB RAM servers, with plenty of room to spare. I recommend running ‘vzsplit’ to generate a good configuration basis for you VEs.
Once we have installed and configured OpenVZ on our new server, we are then able to deploy a large number of VEs for individual users or customers. Each VE provides the user with the ability to have root access, update and install their own software, deploy their own applications, etc. To the user- they are on their own complete system. Should their application misbehave, it won’t affect the others on the system.
Additionally, many resources can be adjusted on the fly. Running out of disk space? Increase it on the fly. Need more memory? Increase on the fly. Live resource management such as this is a very powerful way to leverage your hardware.
We currently are using OpenVZ for CMS development, custom programming development, building custom rpms, running websites, and various other testing where we need easily deployed servers which may or may not be needed of extended periods of time.
Virtualizing our own equipment in this way makes great economic sense for several reasons-. We are using a server which we already own, thus helping us increase our “green” sensibilities by keeping this system out of the landfill. We eliminate the need for more servers for development work. We can even host paying customers, thus deriving income from the hardware. Using our own equipment also helps us keep costs lower by lessening the need to move data and applications offsite to providers such as Slicehost. Slicehost has it’s place- and, in fact, we use them for certain applications- but they do not provide the versatility necessary for much of our development work.
In summary, by leveraging existing, underutilized or potentially retired hardware, you can save money in reduced additional hardware costs, derive income and help the environment. Additionally, the agility in development and deployment that we gain simply adds another layer to the economic advantages that we gain.That sounds like a good plan to me!
