advice request for web servers solutions ?

[lalebarde]

Hi all,
I am going to start my first Web server. I have some questions :

1) For convenience, I would like to setup a virtual server, at least for the development phase. In production, is it safe to keep it like that, or should I migrate my server to a dedicated physical server ?

2) For the virtual server, what solution do you advise (kvm+qemu, virtualbox, xen, proxmox, openvz) for my usage ?

3) My server will have virtual hosts, because I need to create several sites. From what I have read up to now, nginx + apache + mysql or pgsql looks right, or without apache but php-fastcgi (the php-fpm implementation) with lighttpd : http://www.directadmin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=27344 . I try to find a good tutorial based on Gentoo Hardened, with all the topics addressed to build a secure/fast/optimized server. I found http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Nginx and http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Virtual_Webhosting_with_nginx but deal only on nginx, not nginx for static with help of apache for dynamic. Do you have the killing links ?

[AllenJB]

Other than the lack of physical hardware, there's no difference between having a dedicated server and a virtual machine. The vast majority of websites will happily run on the resources of your average virtual machine (eg. ~300M or less RAM, <=10G HDD)

I use different VM setups for different purposes:

1) Virtualbox: I use this on my work desktop and laptop for running linux from Windows because it's easy and quick to configure and basically never breaks.

2) Xen. I use this on my dedicated linux box and I have a rented VM using Xen tech. The latter partially dictates the former because I can create an identical setup (or two) for compiling and testing before implementing changes to the "live" server.

Xen can be a pain to set up initially and does have a habit of breaking things when the xen/xen-tools packages get upgraded.

You also have to watch out for the different kernel patch sets available: official 2.6.18, unofficial 2.6.18+ forward ports, unofficial 2.6.18+ backports and official 2.6.34+. Note that you'll have issues with kernels < ~2.6.22 with Gentoo and udev.


My "production" VM happily runs a number of low traffic websites (apache + mysql + php + proftpd), mail server (dovecot + postfix + spamassassin), personal subversion and trac server, torrent seedbox, irssi and more, all in a ~400M RAM, 20G HDD VM with plenty of room to spare.

I also have a Gentoo VM running KVM, which I just converted from Debian this weekend. It's an old production VM which is being decomissioned, but I've converted it to Gentoo to use as a backup while I do some risky maintainance on my other VM (online expansion of the filesystem after getting an upgrade). I don't have direct access to the kernel / bootloader setup on it, so haven't had to deal with that. I haven't had much chance to look at KVM properly yet, so can't really comment on it.

[lalebarde]

Thanks AllenJB.
I found that : https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-769136-postdays-0-postorder-asc-highlight-qemu+kvm-start-25.html
So I will have a try with KVM. So I consider question 2 closed.

[lalebarde]

[lalebarde]