Saturday 9 October 2010

Ubuntu Server virtualisation on Kimsufi hosting

After yesterday's false start with Citrix XenServer, today I'm switching to Ubuntu Server as my VM hosting platform.

Ubuntu's LTS Server operating system comes with 5 years of free security updates, and has a free built-in VM hosting platform called KVM, which appears to do exactly what I need.  So that seems like a nice easy low-hassle way to go.

Inside the virtual environment, I'll create a VM guest instance of Ubuntu LTS Server as my web server platform, so that backups and disaster recovery are really easy.

So far so good.  Using the automated OS deployment web tool provided by the server hosting company, it only took a few clicks of the mouse to install Ubuntu 10.04 on my Kimsufi KS Q-1T dedicated server.  Total time: about 12 minutes.

There's a small problem with Kimsufi's default Ubuntu server installation: it uses a customised Kimsufi kernel build.  This is annoying in general (customised kernels don't benefit from Ubuntu's automatic security updates) but it's a showstopper for VM hosting environments due to the use of kernel modules.  But this is easily fixed by using Ubuntu's apt-get command to revert to the default Ubuntu Linux kernel, and setting grub to default settings.  See the link below for details.

UPDATE: I've detailed the installation process for setting up an Ubuntu server on Kimsufi hosting, then installing Ubuntu servers as VM guests on that box.  http://blog.martinshouse.com/2012/01/preparing-new-ubuntu-vm-server.html

Useful links:

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