These forums are locked and archived, but all topics have been migrated to the new forum. You can search for this topic on the new forum: Search for OpenVZ administration for Virtualmin on the new forum.
Web Hosting and Cloud Computing Control Panels
It's coming very soon. It's already roughly complete and in closed beta. We plan to announce it officially this week.
We don't support OpenVZ, yet, but probably will soon. vservers (which OpenVZ is built on top of) is one of the initially supported targets, though. It also supports a few other virtualization layers (and is unique in this regard).
--
Check out the forum guidelines!
hey, when you say Vserver you mean Linux Vserver correct ?
http://linux-vserver.org/Welcome_to_Linux-VServer.org << this thing
because i just switched from that thing to OpenVZ, Vserver cant touch openvz has a really bad way of networking, good but if users need iptables ipsec etc etc anything like that its not gonna happpen without the hosting doing it manually for them.
its like i looked forever when i used vserver for a good panel, openvz has a few but now a vserver panel :P
anyways i do some dev'ing for openvz myself i know how it all works very well, i can help you dev it in if you want as i will be very interested in this feature myself.
I have not looked into VirtualMin yet well api wise but i will also be making a plugin for the billing system for virtualmin, to the somewhat popular phpCoin (its not that bad, just needs some TLC) :P
but yea please let me know
<div class='quote'>http://linux-vserver.org/Welcome_to_Linux-VServer.org << this thing </div>
Of course. Is there another one? ;-)
<div class='quote'>its like i looked forever when i used vserver for a good panel, openvz has a few but now a vserver panel :P </div>
The world is funny like that sometimes. ;-)
We actually like Xen best of all, on Linux, so far. Solaris Zones are pretty awesome, too. I think Sun is going to move pretty impressively in the hosting space once folks realize Sun hardware has gotten cheap enough and the software is really really solid (and as soon as they get OpenSolaris into a usable state).
But vservers and OpenVZ kick ass for efficiency. It's really cheap to run a vserver/vz, much like Zones (which are also merely an extra flag indicating what zone the app is running in--same basic model). We've run into many, many, many OpenVZ/Virtuozzo systems that have serious memory bugs, so we kind of avoided it, as it just seemed like signing on for more pain than we wanted to deal with. As far as I know, that memory allocation bug has not been fixed, but there might be workarounds. Perhaps you know better than I. I only have experience with it on other folks machines, and I probably only see the ones that are broken. Maybe if installed and configured correctly, it does not exhibit random memory allocation failures and toxic OOM killer behavior.
<div class='quote'>I have not looked into VirtualMin yet well api wise but i will also be making a plugin for the billing system for virtualmin, to the somewhat popular phpCoin (its not that bad, just needs some TLC) :P</div>
Awesome! We've had a couple of requests for phpCoin integration, but we haven't had time to work on it (and we're not strong PHP developers, though I'm having to learn in order to work on our Joomla-based website).
Let me know if you run into any problems. It's worth noting that the GPL version of Virtualmin also has the basic CRUD interface, so if you're slightly careful you can make your plugin work for the tens of thousands of Virtualmin GPL users, in addition to the several hundred Virtualmin Professional users (it'd also be possible to make it scale up to making use of the Professional-only features, as well, just by detecting the existence of the other commands).
Anyway, we'd love to see more billing options.
--
Check out the forum guidelines!
OpenVZ has really improved its memory bugs over the past release.
Also its actually good to see someone that actually knows the technology most people treat it like a religion, Xen is good but not as good performance wise plus you need that special hardware (ithink)
Right now my main objective would be Openvz in the virtulmin, the PhpCoin would be fairly easy 2 hours max ( i know it quite well), so yea i will make that for sure. PhpCoin really hasnt got much love in the past few years but its still solid. What exactly would you want to see the plugin do ?
Some people write plugins where they pretty much put the features of the control panel inside the billing stuff. I think the plugin should only Create - Disable - Delete - things like that. I think it would be pointless to have start stop etc in the php coin control panel, i think ggiving a link to the virtualmin would be best in that reguard, maybe you could modify the virtualmin a tad to make it kinda phpcoin ish in the design a little maybe, hmm i dont know.
Well yea i can for sure do it, in the next few days as well for the phpcoin.
my main concern is the OpenVZ control from the virtualmin, i dont have much power there :D
well anyways let me know, and thanks for the response.
p.s. im in a hurry right now dont mind the typos
<div class='quote'>OpenVZ has really improved its memory bugs over the past release.</div>
Well, that's good anyway. It was unusable, before, as far as I could tell. ;-)
<div class='quote'>Xen is good but not as good performance wise plus you need that special hardware (ithink) </div>
Xen has multiple types of virtualization. One type requires a hypervisor extension equipped CPU (all 64 bit Intel and AMD CPUs produced in the past year have these extensions, I believe), while the rest do not. I used to use it years ago on very low end hardware, and it worked fine. The only seeming negative from a "performance" standpoint is that memory is not shared in a Xen deployment. You can't oversell a Xen system--if you tell the host it can have 256MB, then that guest system will actually lock up 256MB of RAM on your physical box. vserver/openvz/Zones do not exhibit this behavior. They are more like applications, in that they'll take what the OS gives them using normal allocation routines. And it may be that overselling is the major source of problems I've seen on OpenVZ/Virtuozzo systems in the past--if you're a responsible provider, maybe it won't happen at all. I dunno.
<div class='quote'>Some people write plugins where they pretty much put the features of the control panel inside the billing stuff.</div>
Which is, of course, absolutely foolish. Managing virtual hosting accounts is orthogonal to billing issues, and it takes us several hundred thousand lines of code to do it well...folks who think a few hundred lines of code added to a billing system can solve these problems is just asking for a life of agony (or pitiful results). ;-)
<div class='quote'>I think the plugin should only Create - Disable - Delete - things like that. I think it would be pointless to have start stop etc in the php coin control panel,</div>
I agree whole-heartedly. Just like we don't try to address billing problems. Billing is a hard set of problems, I'm not saying that hosting is the only hard part of the equation...it's just that they are two very divergent sets of problems, and the solution is to take a good solution to each set of problems and combine them cleanly.
You've absolutely got the right idea to keep the billing software focused on billing and the hosting software focused on hosting management. The billing app can, of course, ask the hosting app to help with automation of the actual hosting accounts. That's why we've got the API.
<div class='quote'>my main concern is the OpenVZ control from the virtualmin, i dont have much power there :D</div>
Well, let us get it launched with the current feature set, and then in a week or two, we'll see about adding OpenVZ to the supported virtualization targets.
--
Check out the forum guidelines!
Can I add it? I will do it :P
This will be used commercial for a hosting company, and im sure the company will support it in every way with proper funding but yea, this is like the last option, theres like no panels out there, well 1 or 2 but none are really stable and some lock you own with crazy payment schemes, anyways let me know
I actually just switched back to Linux Vserver due to in my opinion its horrible way of handling things, back to linux vserver.
:P
when ya gonna have this thing up ?
Ive integrated quite a bit of PHPCoin although phpcoin is horrible, code hasn't been touched in about 5 years, but yea its really bad the way they do it i mean really bad
Im thinking of a nice alternative right now i might integrate as well,.
But yea thanks and let me know
<div class='quote'>I actually just switched back to Linux Vserver due to in my opinion its horrible way of handling things, back to linux vserver.</div>
Heheh...Good to know. Yes, I've always felt like OpenVZ was more hype than good technology. They took vservers, wrote a bunch of new management tools, made a bunch of proprietary extensions in the form of Virtuozzo, broke a few things in the process, and called it a whole new project. But the fact is, the majority of the really hard work was done by the vservers folks (Jacques Gelinas, to be specific, and the current project lead, Herbert Pötzl). On the whole I haven't been impressed, which is why we started with the original vserver project. It just feels more like our kind of project.
But, the hype machine for OpenVZ has been effective, so we'll probably end up doing something with it, as well.
BTW-We can probably solve the firewall problem on vserver, without any trouble--though I don't see much value in firewalls on a hosting server. It provides little more than a false sense of security--the attack vectors on a webserver all have to be open, because that's why you have the server in the first place (e.g. you can't close the web server port, or the mail port, or the POP/IMAP ports, because you need all of those to do the job...so, basically, folks use a firewall on a webserver to close ports that aren't even listening...which is pointless).
Anyway, the initial VM2 repository is going live today. I hope to have both Debian 4.0 and CentOS 5 support up and running by the end of the day. The installer might take another day or two. But VM2 is so much simpler to deploy than Virtualmin that it's not going to be nearly as complicated--it might even just be a repository and a single command line for how to install the packages.
--
Check out the forum guidelines!
Hi, Joe
Yea I have been doing alot of integrating for certain things here as well. Linux Vserver is a great project, I know the devs a little, great people. OpenVZ turned out to be a disaster the memory stuff was horrible, just not what i was looking for.
I would like to know what the progress on the Linux Vserver integration stuff is. I would like to maybe somehow integrate the api for it in a few billing systems. Linux Vserver doesnt have much web control applications so this could be a great niche.
Thanks again
I mean will people be able to start stop and etc their vserver ?
and do you guys already have the openVZ api integrated, its a very popular vm solution :P
and will it be just for admins or can users log in their self ?
thanks and let me know
Yes, of course. The whole point of it is the allow management from multiple tiers.
And, as I said, OpenVZ isn't supported yet, but probably will be. vservers (which is the underlying core upon which OpenVZ lightly sits) is. OpenVZ is, I believe, primarily popular because it has decent tools for hosting management, while everything else requires you to roll your own even at the most basic level. Since we've built tools for hosting management...that benefit becomes unimportant. The important bit then becomes "what's the best underlying technology for what I'm trying to accomplish". For some, that'll be vservers (or OpenVZ, eventually), and for others it'll be Xen or Solaris zones.
Both administrators and users will have login privileges. Obviously, the users will be able to do far less than administrators.
--
Check out the forum guidelines!