[BNM] [OT] Re: UML or V-Server on EC2

[Tom Dussek (Hotmail)]

Just when I'd begun to fear that the world has lost all mystery and 
wonder, I'd like to congratulate Mr. Caines-Gooby on the most fantastic 
4 paragraphs I've read but not understood in ages.

Tom Dussek; Simple Dolt


Jay Caines-Gooby wrote:
> Now that we have (I'm going to curse it now, by writing this) a nice
> stable EC2 architecture and are getting a feel for what works and what
> doesn't, I'm looking at what else we can do with it.
> 
> The most immediate issue is that we have a single nginx server
> proxying both mongrel and fast-cgi. Stopping nginx means *everything*
> stops however briefly. I'd like a bit of separation here. Because EC2
> uses Xen, we can't use another system-level virtualisation technology
> (no Xen-on-Xen and "its turtles all the way down" action possible) but
> anecdotally, it seems that UML or Linux V-Server OS virtualisation
> seems to be do-able with little performance penalty.
> 
> What's V-Server like to administer? Can the host OS continue with its
> own functionality, or is it all given over to running V-Server virtual
> instances?
> 
> Ideally, I'd like to add a basic virtual host which just runs its own
> nginx and fastcgi servers, and keep the rest of the existing server's
> functionality without having to V-Server this as well. We could buy an
> additional elastic IP for it, so it gets its own separate IP address.
>