VMware hosting or real server?

[richardpk]

I'm just setting a site up for a friend that is going to require some decent processing power, but I'm also keen to try out this cloud stuff to gain some extra reliability.

I have a DL360 (HP) with Xeon x3210 (4 core) at home that I have been developing the site on. Performance is okay but could be better. I am thinking of doing a trial with stratogen (vmware hosting) but wondered what experience others have of this kind of setup. Are there any decent cloud hosting companies out there that offer the kind of performance you can expect with a real server? Or am I better off buying a decent server with a more modern processor and getting that hosted somewhere?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts,

Rich.

 

[MasterPlan1]

Depends on how intensive the app is going to be. If it spends the majority of it's time sitting there doing nothing, then a big burst of processing, then nothing, VM would be fine. If it's an always intensive app, it would be worth looking at a dedicated server.

At my current company we run VMWare for all our apps, which are primarily tomcat based, and sometimes have issues with load when heavy processing is going on - although, this is partially owing to poor coding on the devs part but this can easily be resolved by some load balancing between a couple of VMs, which we're getting RH to come in and do for us.

One of the deciding costs would be dedicated server + hosting vs hosted VM, as if you take a look at that calculator of price, to up the RAM of the basic hosting that you get to something of a reasonable server, it's going to be a couple of hundred quid a month. Taking into account, a decent DL380 G7 + 12Gb of RAM and 3x146, will set you back ~£1500 (I think that is what I paid for the last server I bought in?), then whatever the price of co-lo will be ontop of that per month. Plus, you can run ESXi on the G7 to be able to run multiple boxes.

 

[oneilldo]

I have a DL360 (HP) with Xeon x3210 (4 core) at home that I have been developing the site on. Performance is okay but could be better.

If your after performance then I would spend time tuning your app, which part of it is the slowest. Is it disk/CPU or network. Does it access the DB, correct indexes etc etc. A quad core xeon is a fairly decent chip.

If your after extra reliability then I suppose virtualisation is a possible answer. I'm unsure how these firms charge but I imagine they charge on how much memory, CPU cores, Storage and bandwidth you need so your performance improvements may also reduce the need for more cores/memory so it will save you money.

Basically time spent performance tuning is time well spent.

 

[LizardKing]

If your after performance then I would spend time tuning your app, which part of it is the slowest. Is it disk/CPU or network. Does it access the DB, correct indexes etc etc. A quad core xeon is a fairly decent chip.

This will reap the best rewards, your going to have a lot of problems if your already suffering slow speed with 1user on that hardware.

However, we use Amazon EC2 for our "elastic" needs.