Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : VPS Hosting : VPS performance / server

[whoppe]

We are getting into VPS hosting and wanted to get some opinions and feedback as we're quite unsure on what to expect as for performance and how many clients we can generally keep on a box.

For now we've bought 3 dell R710 with dual Xeon L5520, 72GB ram and 8 x 2.5" SAS drives.

We are thinking of a base offering of 512 megabytes of ram and
was hoping to get about 40-50 onto a server.

With 40 there should be -plenty- free ram and plenty drivecache.

Then a next offering of 1 gig ram and next one of 2 gigs.

Even if we do the biggest 2 gig offering with 25 on a server we should have free ram to spare.

The software would be virtuozzo.

Any thoughts on this, am I expecting too much, or am I being fairly realistic?

edit: We do not wish to do gross overselling, I believe that overselling capacities, especially things such as RAM in vz will lead to "interesting" errors
which will only drive customers away.

[UNIXy]

It's all relative. For some, 10 VEs per server is too much. For others, it's 40+. From experience, stability and user experience goes south as the number of VEs per physical server increases. Realize that with an 8-core server, only 8 processes can be running at any point in time so if you have 40 more or less busy VEs on a server, chances are the runqueue / loadavg will always be high.

I personally put a limit at 10 (2 VEs being used internally for miscellaneous management tasks). But I also only target an audience that needs 2GBs of memory and up (memory being the limiting factor). But with this mindset, disk IOPs takes care of itself.

Regards

[DME-Geoff]

Also you should concern yourself with disk i/o. Or limit X amount of VPS to a certain HD. With 40-50 VPS pounding the same HD things could grind down a bit.

Great server stats though.

[cmanns]

Yeah get multiple drives, we run a few vps's on one very fast sata2 drive, and websites and such on another (Same box) it's never been nailed in it's life (Slammed)

Our db box runs backups on a separate drive, we can backup during peak hours and it has no effect

:-)

[whoppe]

cmanns: there is 8 x 2.5" SAS drives

With this offering i'm targeting low to medium end utilization.
Certainly not high end.

For us, many of these clients will come from shared hosting clients who need to do something our shared platform does not support.

I guess at the end of the day we gotta keep our eyes at munin to and listen closely to clients in the beginning to see how things are developing.

[aznium]

i am interested - pm me about the 512mb

[whoppe]

Originally Posted by aznium

i am interested - pm me about the 512mb

Unless you are in the scandinavian market I unfortunately do not have anything to offer for you.

btw: We would be using the PEM control panel to provision the VPS.