NYCPHP Meetup

[Michael Hernandez]

On Oct 24, 2007, at 6:57 PM, csnyder wrote:

> On 10/24/07, Pete Czech - New Possibilities Group, LLC
> <czech at npgroup.net> wrote:
>> This is a little bit off topic, but I'm wondering how the group feels
>> about running servers off of VMWare.  I have a social networking site
>> currently with about 1M+ uniques/mo.  Runs on php5/MySQL.  I've been
>> toying with moving to servers hosted on VMWare and load balanced.
>> Anyone have any experiences, pros, cons of installing such an  
>> architecture?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Pete Czech
>
> There have been recent issues running Linux on VMWare--you have to
> configure 2.6 kernels not to hit the clock so hard, a fairly easy fix
> in recent versions. I still saw above average clock skew on mine
> (30-40 seconds over 24 hours), but ymmv. I've never tried to put one
> under production load.
>
> I like virtualization a lot for simple things like proxys and mirrors,
> which I'm happy to let somebody else host. There are a lot of folks
> doing VPS. My advice is to find a host that allows you to build your
> own images, and stay away from the "web control panel" unless you have
> time to audit it. Check out Amazon's EC2, also.
>
> -- 

At my office we run some FreeBSD virtual machines in VMWare and serve  
some PHP web applications including Plesk and some custom apps. As  
long as you have decent hardware for it it's not really a problem,  
but be careful with your clock - there are some tweaks you need to  
perform to keep the virtual server clock in sync with the real clock.  
NTP helps but if you don't adjust some RTC settings the clock will be  
horribly skewed (this is with 6.1, not sure about more recent  
versions). In terms of PHP performance I haven't noticed any  
significant issues.

--Mike H