I am curious about your thoughts and ideas about this project. I would not be able to do this myself but it might be something worth looking into. I have read talk about seperating the individual servers in order to move away from having a LAMP server. The pro's of this move is very apparent. I would like to take that idea one more step and make the install process easy. Using Xen we would be able to create virtual machines and be able to accomplish the same security goal. Each server would be running under its own operating system. This would limit the risk to the system if one of the server software tools we are using becomes exploited. we would need to provide a program on each comptuer to allow them to talk to eachother but this shouldn't be difficult. i believe work is already underway for this. Xen might even provide a tool that could accomplish this for us but I am not positive. The overhead of the VM's under Xen should be minimal. Inorder to make this easier to install I would like to create an install disk that would automate this process. Users would be able to simple place the disk into the server, answer a few questions, and then let the process run. Once it is complete his server is fully set up and ready to go. Should not be to hard to accomplish if we piggy back off of debian or other linux distro. This idea might be more of an idea for the buisness side of this opensource product. Please tell me what your thoughts and ideas are for this. Negative and positive feedback...doesn't matter.
I like your Idea and most parts are already realised in the ISPConfig 3 concept. Having multiple servers is not only for security, its mostly for load balancing and running large enviroments with thousands of websites. ISPCOnfig 3 supports not only having multiple servers, it supports aso spreading the services over multiple servers, so a xen setup you described is possible with ISPConfig 3 out of the box. If the enviroment is based on xen it will not be nescessary to make a new install disk. With xen it is easy to provie disk images that are ready installed incl. ISPConfig installation.
my main interest was to be able to provide security easily to people with only one server. The other interest in this was to allow someone to be able to pop in an install disk, onto a single server, to be able to test the full features of ispconfig. From there they can move it to multiple servers. Are we thinking the same thing? Is this already under development?
From the point of the ISPConfig controlpanel there is no difference if the services are located on different servers or only different virtual machines. I think to provide a full featured server install CD is a big project on itself. For me the better approach is to provide ready installed XEN and vmware images, so everybody can test an ISPConfig server even on a windows box with the free vmware player. To provide these images is much easier then to build a special server linux distribution on CD.
