I'm interested in providing VPS's and would like to know how I would accomplish that. My servers will be running Red Hat Linux Enterprise. Any help would be appreciated.

go with virtuozzo

UML is what we are using with no problems (user-mode-linux.sf.net )

Rus

What flavor of Linux do you run?

RedHat or Debian on the hosts and then offer a choice of distros underneath that

Rus

i can vouch for user-mode-linux.sf.net

Red Hat as the host, dont go debian ;)

Well, I would be running Red Hat Enterprise as the host, would that cause any problems, because it's not a plain Red Hat version?

Don't see why. UML itself needs a custom kernel anda few userland tools built from source

Rus

Well then I would have to get one dedicated server for the VPS and another for regular shared hosting?

Originally posted by Heymish
Red Hat as the host, dont go debian ;)


some people prefer debian because of the neat little packages!

Well, I'm already going with Red Hat. I'm just going to stick with what I know. :)

Originally posted by thelinuxguy
some people prefer debian because of the neat little packages!
most people prefer over RH because of its far superior packagemagement .
I'm currently adminstering both debian and redhat boxes , and the RH box is the most annoying (packagemagement style) .
Debians .deb and the wonderful apt tools make for a killer packagemagement
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Which VPS software is better overall? What are their advantages?

UML is fairly good .
It can be a bit of a pain to get working initially (lots of kernel patching , odd errors , not that great documentation) but once you get it working it seems fairly stable . The price is also right ($0) , although you will probably end up spending a bit in work hours (if you have salaried staff sitting around doing nothing then no addition $) .UML can only be used for linux , on linux . It provides true virtualization (root access , unique IP , ability to cap memory and swap space usage , etc.) The cool thing is that you can run different distributions (although it can be a pain in the *** to setup things like debian , linux from scratch ,etc. (read : yet another kernel patch:-) ) depending on what your customers want.
Things like the virtual BSD (FreeVSD?) ones are essentialy jail shales with root access , there a bit shaddy (more so than UML) and I'm fairly certain that everyone is stuck using the same distrobution of BSD as you are (If I undertsnad correctly the chrooted jail shales , but then again I have never set one up) .
I dont know enough about the commercial packages to even talk about them (who the hell wants to spend massive $ for something that is closed source?) .

Yeah with FreeBSD Jails (FreeVSD is something totally different) people have to use the same distro as the host machine or things like killall, ps etc break. You can just about stay within the same major version (i.e. 4.x) but a 5.x jail won't start on 4.x

Rus