[TriLUG] Apache2 / PHP / MySQL Help?

[Brian McCullough]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 02:23:46AM -0400, Justis Peters wrote:
> Brian McCullough wrote:
> > As it happens, Justis, rPath is my home these days too, and has been for
> > a couple of years.
> >   
> Congratulations!  It seems like a good home, from what I can tell.  I 
> apologize that I didn't already know you worked there.  I met Matt 

Sorry, wrong terminology.  I am a fan of theirs and have moved almost
all of my servers and desktop machines ( including laptops ) to rPath,
including Xen ( not para, "older" AMD CPUs -- what, six months? ) for
the servers.



> > Unfortunately, it is a client machine, in a rack in San Jose, installed
> > with Debian Sarge.  

> Well, my suggestion to avoid the problem and use virtualization was 
> before I knew that it was for an existing client on an existing server.  
> 
> Based on the current machine setup, though, you're not going to be happy 
> with virtualization as the solution, unless you move all the virtual 
> hosts into one or two VMs.  You generally don't want to give each 
> website its own virtual machine, unless there are compelling security or 
> scalability reasons to do so.  

Which I don't.  I don't have much experience with VMware, having started
with Xen, and generally liking it.  However, it means completely
rebuilding the machine, which the client isn't too enthusiastic about,
since he is here on the right coast, with me, and the machine is on the
left.



> "pile" of virtual hosts, along with the PHP one, into a single virtual 
> machine.  For the technology stack you're using (LAMP), you'll get the 
> biggest bang for your buck with a Xen kernel, paravirtualized.  The 
> performance hit is very small and you gain a lot of benefits, like the 
> potential for easy backup and disaster recovery, the ability to clone a 
> production environment precisely, and the ability to do easy 
> deploy/rollback of new software versions.

I completely agree.  When I retired my various servers, running multiple
versions of Linux ( I kept the OpenBSD firewall ), and built one big Xen
box with rPath and several rPath domU clients, it made life much easier.