VirtuozzoDan

Hello,

I recently developed an 18 CPU deployment to a company in the adult wedsite industy, and I thought this might work for others. My Product (Virtuozzo) is a server virualization software, unlike Vmware or MS Virtual server. Our product Virtualizes the OS. There are many benefits to this approach.

1. Better performance/low overhead -- We experience less then 3% in performance overhead on servers running Virtuozzo.

2. Savings on OS server licenses -- a single OS license per physical server is all that is required to run Virtuozzo virtual servers, and not one for each and every virtual server.

3. Saving on the managment costs - Virtuozzo ships with number of various mass-managment tools, f.e. ability to roll application update across 100s of virtual servers with single click.

4. Dynamic real-time resource control -- Resources such as CPU, Memory, Disk Space and Network bandwidth can all be reallocated between virtual services in Real-time and On-demand. You can also migrate virtual servers between physical servers.

5. Scalability -- Any virtual server can scale up-to the full capacity of the physical host (f.e. 16CPU, 64GB RAM).

6. Very quick ROI -- Because of our better performance, savings on the hardware, software, and managment efforts, Virtuozzo's ROI is far greater compared with any other technology on the market: any hardware emulation technology allows savings only on the hardware (and even that to much lesser degree compared with Virtuozzo).

I'll be happy to discuss any of these topics is further detail, also we offer 30 day evaluations as well. If you are interested please email me at [email protected]

Thank you for your time,

Regards,

Dan

hotstuff

without disk i/o resource controls, this is useless. one 'virtual environment' which starts swapping heavily enough is going to kill the rest of the box. yes, i know what i am talking about.

your product itself offers *nothing* that xen does not. you do have a nice management app, but it costs too much for a single server deployment. whats worse is that since you are closed source, your clients are stuck waiting for security updates until you manage to patch your stuff. can you say ouch?

im still waiting for someone to submit a gpl code disclosure request. your kernel patches and module are in violation of the gpl. the only reason noone has done it this far is you forcing people to sign an nda before they ever look at any of your products.

you had an excellent business opportunity a year or two ago when your stuff was the only thin virtualization technology on the market. however, you completely priced yourself out of the non-enterprise market and the complete ineptness of your sales force at that time was staggering. now that xen is out, with ibm and novell building management tools on top of it, youre done. but you know that, which is why you bought plesk. interestingly enough, plesk sucks ass too.

VirtuozzoDan

We do have disk I/O resource control.

Here is the comparison of Virtuozzo for XEN.

- System management tools. Virtuozzo comes with a complete set of management tools which includes an XML/API, complete command Line interface, SOAP interface, and a GUI tool. We also us a secure VPS "Service VPS" interface to manage the connections to the physical server as well as the VPSs. This enables us to completely control traffic to the host from the outside world, and considerably improves the stability of the host OS. We also offer departmental interfaces that would allow administrators to offer a management utility to the individual Virtual servers.

- XEN QOS settings are not changeable without a server reboot. For example in the case of XEN memory must be allocated on VM creation and may not be freed without VM reboot. In the case of Virtuozzo you can change CPU, Memory, Network I/O, Disk I/O all on the fly and without having to reboot the servers. You can also migrate servers, between physical hardware nodes even with non-shared storage. This is not possible with XEN.

- XEN currently supports Linux distributions only. In the case of Virtuozzo management of both Linux and Windows environments are possible. It is also possible to manage both environments under one management interface.

- Virtuozzo offers the ability to template an application and share a single instance of an application without having to load a separate instance of the application for each and every VPS. This will save you on both application licensing costs as well as resource costs on your server.

- XEN is considered a Para virtualization solution. Para virtualization contains the same inherent overhead of technologies such as VMWare - there is a base OS and additional OSes are ported on top, meaning there are multiple complete instances of OSes. This means it is possible to place fewer server instances on a single physical server. So XEN is less scalable and you will experience greater overhead with XEN.

- XEN is not operating in many critical application environments, while VZ is a proven product that has been in production for over 3 years.


I'm not sure how we priced ourselves out of the market. You can put multiple virtual servers on the same physical machine for the price of one. Also with our management tools and templating tools you can create create a preconfigured server in as little as 3 mouse clicks. This saves you time and money. I can also run you through our ROI model if you are interested.

It sounds like you haven't tried Virtuozzo in awhile, it is now available for windows 2003, and if you are interested I can send you the download instructions to test it out.

Dan

inabon

i would be interested hit me up at [email protected]


however i agree with him about plesk. i have 1 box running it and it sucks pretty bad. the whole thing is crashing and no word from customer service.



however i want to try the virtuozo. let me have a shot at it i need a tech guy of yours to contact me so we can talk tech not sales bull.

take care.

__________________
Whoever dies with most toys wins.

fris

plesk is very minimal, i dont even like ensim, and cpanel, bleck. well you got hsphere, still has problems, direct admin i find is good, but these are all for end users, i myself dont even use a control panel since i manage my own servers, give me console, i will do everything myself.

but most of my clients request direct admin or cpanel.

most people hate plesk. not much to offer. not very user friendly.

__________________
Since 1999: 69 Adult Industry awards for Best Hosting Company and professional excellence.


WP Stuff

VirtuozzoDan

If anyone else is having problems with Plesk. Please feel free to email me at [email protected]. Although I don't support this product. I will help get your issues resolved.

Regards,

Dan

hotstuff

you do? how does it work? please elaborate, i am skeptical, primarily because i looked into coding this and it is *very* hard to deal with disk io coming from page cache ops and because your company has a track record of bogus technical claims. my mind is open however - prove me wrong.

your management tools are good, i already stated that. at the time i was considering virtuozzo, they cost 1-2k iirc. has this changed?

this is blatantly incorrect. both ram size and cpu qos is changable with one command each. its right there in the xen documentation. did you just not bother to read or are you doing this deliberately? dont you think its a bit low to disseminate completely incorrect information about your competitors' products? if you havent noticed, the adult industry is big on integrity and honesty and you arent doing yourself any favours in either of those departments.

as far as network io, you can use whatever method floats your boat with xen - no support for this from xen is required.

bzzzzzzzzzt, wrong answer. you can migrate xen vms perfectly fine without shared storage. again, its right there in the docs.

yes, youve got nice mgmt tools. novell, ibm and sun are working on theirs for xen. xensource also has something in the works. this is one area you have advantage in.

only partially correct. there is a xen implementation for windows, but it can not be released due to licensing issues. who cares about windows boxes anyway? the only thing they're good for in this vertical is drm.

again, mostly incorrect. whether you can save on licensing costs depends on the license, and most licenses do not in fact allow you to save money in this scenario - your costs might be higher.

it is perfectly possible to achieve the same (or even better) hdd space utilization in xen using lvm copy on write, without the dubious benefit of your filter filesystem. id rather use something i can trust, like ext3, than to keep my fingers crossed that your coders didnt fuck up interaction with vfs - filter filesystems are not trivial.

virtuozzo uses *the same kernel* for all virtual environments (which is a problem, as i will explain later). this allows your product to save ram on some application pages. very small benefit and the downsides of your architecture outweigh it to the point of it being completely negligible.

wow. you folks are either completely clueless or lying through your teeth. neither bodes well for you. there is all the difference in the world between how xen and vmware do things. the large overhead in vmware comes from interpretation of machine code (iow vmware emulates a cpu in software a bit like java does) - xen does not do that.

youre saying this as if it were a bad thing. newsflash: its much, much better. in fact, virtuozzo being a shared kernel solution is why we didnt purchase it. there are numerous resources in the kernel (various datastructures primarily, ie queues) which your virtual environments may have to contend for. you do not and can not provide qos for all of these and even if you wanted to, managing that would be nearly impossible.

the greatest thing about vmware is that vms are almost completely separate - xen gives you that separation, but without vmware's overhead. virtuozzo is just an expensive (albeit technically complex) step up from a grouping fair share process scheduler + chroot jail.

this is a very disingenious way to twist the facts. because virtuozzo runs all environments on the same kernel instance and xen provides separate OS instances, you can physically *boot* less xen environments because each uses more ram.

why is it disingenious then you might ask? because what counts is how many environments you can run under a given load. who the heck is going to run 100 vms? this isnt a mainframe, brother. good luck competing with the z series.

beyond that, what really counts is how much work you can get done per unit of time for your dollar. given that virtuozzo costs only slightly less than a new server, its easy to see how there is absolutely no comparison there.

ive already disproved all of the claims you used to support this assertion. lets look at some benchmarks, xen vs virtuozzo, vs uml, vs vmware. xen beats both uml and vmware hands down. where are the virtuozzo benchmarks?

ahh, thats right - there are none. why? because swsoft makes you sign an nda before you ever see the code, so even if you did benchmarks, youd have to take them to the grave with you. does this sound like a company which is confident in its product? incidentally, vmware's new eula prohibits publishing of comparative benchmarks as well. coincidence? i think not, but its too late now - they got beat ten ways till sunday by a year old alpha version of xen.

i know of enough deployments in mission critical environments to let me sleep well at night. i also know people who run virtuozzo and had spec-fucken-tacular outages with it, not to mention support issues.

you priced yourselves out of the non-enterprise market, im sure your slick fabrications and roi models work well in the enterprise. ive seen them, they dont apply to me and they arent going to apply to anyone on this board, so please spare me.

[quote]
It sounds like you haven't tried Virtuozzo in awhile, it is now available for windows 2003, and if you are interested I can send you the download instructions to test it out.
[quote]

get one of your engineers to answer the disk io question. im interested in technical details. then stop lying. after that, ill consider doing business with you.

look, i realize youre just a sales rep. you sell using the sales material you are given and you dont have the technical background to be able to call bullshit on it. please understand that im not trying to give you personally a hard time, but your product isnt as great as your glossy brochures and koolaid say it is and the dishonesty in your marketing claims would make the guy responsible for the "windows has lower tco than linux" campaign blush.

hotstuff

ensim is the spawn of satan. how you can code such an inflexible monstrosity in a language as powerful and flexible as python will forever boggle my mind. cpanel still has critical bugs found years ago unfixed, while new useless features have been added constantly. newsflash: perl hacks (not hackers, thats too respectful) with no idea about proper design shouldnt be coding large projects where things need to work reliably. hsphere is java (ugh), not very user friendly and way too complex. some nice engineering behind it, though. directadmin is excellent.

my point was that swsoft saw how screwed they were with virtuozzo and bought plesk, except plesk is in the doldrums as well. i feel sorry for swsoft, i really do - theyve got some good engineers there.

hotstuff

dont bother, honest advice. virtuozzo will not work well at all for shared hosting. its been tried, it doesnt work, some people are still ruining their reputations trying to make it work.

VirtuozzoSimon

Hi All,

Sorry about unearthing this post, but some things are different since my colleague Dan last wrote in. Plus, I would like a chance to clarify some of the issues addressed. Namely:

1) Disk I/O: In the scenario that one virtual server was absorbing most of the resources available on the physical machine, this is probably not a server you would want to virtualize. However, for the scenario where your server is being underutilized, Virtuozzo lets you put the unused resources at the disposal of other virtual servers, instead of provisioning a new physical machine.

2) Open Source/NDA: While we do ask everyone testing VZ Linux to sign an NDA, there is an open-source version available to all those who want to research and develop Virtuozzo. The url is www.openvz.org

3) Cost: The cost of Virtuozzo continues to be in the neighborhood you mention. Is this price too high? If by paying the price of one new server you eliminate just 2 machines, that's money in your pocket. Bring the number you can fit onto a single box up to 20 (which is what our demo server P3 with a gig of Ram has) and the savings are substantial.

We've also released a physical to virtual migration utility for our Linux version. This is something VMWare or Xen (I may be wrong for Xen, but I couldn't find any mention on their site) offer on their own.

As Dan mentioned, Virtuozzo for Linux is a proven technology. If you get a Virtual Private Server from GoDaddy, its running on Virtuozzo. There are over 250,000 virtual private servers in production right now. Regarding our other products, HSPc, PEM, and of course Plesk...the fact that 9 out of the top 10 hosting companies worldwide use at least one of them says a lot.

My understanding of how the adult industry works online is that Virtuozzo would probably be better suited to the needs of streaming video on paysites. This is more CPU/memory intensive on the server, than say, picture hosting. They should therefore benefit more from our resource management capabilities and be able to maximize their hardware better since each VPS can access resources as needed, rather than each server being assigned them in advance and sitting idly.

On the other hand, affiliate webmasters with picture and movie galleries (and the paysite freehosts which often support them) should continue to do well on today's shared hosting architecture. Especially if bandwidth becomes cheaper

Hotstuff, it seems like the last time you spoke with someone at SWSoft was a while ago. I invite you and everybody else to check out our new site www.virtuozzo.com or email [email protected]. Virtuozzo is rapidly gaining momentum in the hosting space as a stable and flexible VPS technology. More and more webmasters are hosting their websites on VPS's at hosting companies which run Virtuozzo. I would love to get webmasters that host their own sites to do the same.

VirtuozzoSimon

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