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A virtual private server is one server that has been partitioned near the root, and is split into numerous servers which are dedicated. The good thing about this is that the user can share the cost of the connection, as well as the maintenance and hardware. Like the shared hosting, you can split the cost with other users, but you are given a larger degree of freedom. The most powerful advantage to the virtual private server is that you are allowed to have complete maintenance over the site, and you are not at the mercy of a system administrator. It should also be noted that this server type has a high level of security for a very competitive cost.

The virtual private server is a great option for small or medium sized companies. These businesses tend to have needs which are quite complex, and the virtual private server can meet them. Despite this, there are disadvantages to the virtual private server as well. Users are expected to have a certain level of programming experience if they want to change the settings. However, many companies will provide you with a manual, and this will make things easier.

Finally, a world-class hypervisor – XenServer from Citrix is available for free business usage. I didn’t believe Citrix will be offering XenServer for free including Live motion and other features. Fully supported Windows and Linux OSes under 64-bit as well as 8 virtual CPUs! Very nice platform for virtualization and it doesn’t cost a dollar! It’s free. Use it!

Everyone is buzzing around virtualization and private servers these days. One of the most popular platform for server virtualization is XEN – it’ s very efficent, FREE, reliable and has a big community behind it. There are many folks that use it and even commercial providers use XEN in their commercial virtualization products. Xen is used as a base on Novell SLES XEN, Oracle VM, Citrix XenServer (they bought XEN actually), Virtual Iron it’ s been very stable and with high performance.

So if you want to test Windows or Linux distributive use Xen – it works on 32 or 64 bit platforms without any problems and the performance is very close to native OS performance running on a dedicated hardware.  Some people report performance gains when XEN is used to virtualize multiple OSes under one physical hardware. Anyway, we have been testing XEN and running it in web hosting environment and it’s really great. It’ s a real virtualization platform you can trust and use for production hosting environment.

Sorry for being a bit lazy and non posting lately. It’s been  busy time for me and finally I thought I should follow up and post something useful.

I joined another company that uses Vmware for all test environments, including Linux and Windows OS. It’s pretty neat virtualization software – you can install new nodes without sitting near the console in a cold data center room and it fully supports Windows 2003 and Windows XP. We have been running Suse Enterprise versions on it using Oracle DB and so far so good.

The only drawback of using virtual private servers is the low performance on the IO – we have been using SCSI disks some in RAID 10 configuration but it still much lower than for a dedicated box. However, as I previously noted vmware is great FREE software that you can run for almost any test environment or even a small secondary daemons – SMTP or DNS, for example. Stay tunned for more news!