Managing VPS services
Hi hi,
Anyone here know about offering and managing VPS services? The school I work for offers a lot of web development and programming classes, but students are very limited in what they can do because of how we have our open web server configured. I'm thinking of proposing that we move to a VPS solution instead of simple web directories, but I have no idea where to start. We don't want to have to manually configure and install 1000 VPS's every year, only to wipe them six months later.
I've used a couple VPS's before, and they both had the great option to wipe and reinstall, which would be ideal. I think giving users this kind of setup would be awesome, and would effectively stop the limitations we have to place on them now.
Anyone here know about offering and managing VPS services? The school I work for offers a lot of web development and programming classes, but students are very limited in what they can do because of how we have our open web server configured. I'm thinking of proposing that we move to a VPS solution instead of simple web directories, but I have no idea where to start. We don't want to have to manually configure and install 1000 VPS's every year, only to wipe them six months later.
I've used a couple VPS's before, and they both had the great option to wipe and reinstall, which would be ideal. I think giving users this kind of setup would be awesome, and would effectively stop the limitations we have to place on them now.
Comments
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MentholMoose
Member Posts: 1,525 ■■■■■■■■□□
The free version of Virtuozzo is OpenVZ. There are some free control panels that provide a web interface that may suit your needs. I'm not really familiar with these applications so I can't comment on them.
If you are already using and/or familiar with virtualization, you may want to look into using servers running a standard hypervisor with some sort of self-service "cloud" orchestration layer to allow students to access them. VMware has their vCloud suite, but the features and especially pricing may be overkill for your needs. Fortunately there are open source alternatives... OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, to name a few (and most have commercial support if you need it). I'm sure all of these are being used by schools, and likely for similar uses as you are considering.
These cloud orchestrators can authenticate students using your existing user directory (e.g. LDAP/AD) and allow you to provide a certain amount of resources to students. For example, students could be given (up to) 1 VM each, created from disk images or ISOs you specify, with CPU/RAM/network settings based on what you allow. They have web interfaces and APIs, as well as EC2-compatible APIs, so students can learn about using EC2, and you can easily script things like deleting VMs at the end of the semester.MentholMoose
MCSA 2003, LFCS, LFCE (expired), VCP6-DCV -
it_consultant
Member Posts: 1,903
Later this month I will finally retire virtuozzo in my environment. Whatever you do, go with a standard hypervisor, not this fake para-virtualization of virtuozzo.
