Hello folks, Here comes another novel I am going to be building a new server soon and wanted some advice mainly pertaining to: 1. Speed of the server 2. Ease of backups Please note all of the websites I tinker with are all Joomla CMS based. I am a novice in the extreme who absolutely loathes the cli lol Without being able to copy and paste the excellent tutorials here on how2forge I would be screwed. Also without the awesome advice received from Falko, Till, Hans, Mark NL, and others I would be hard pressed as well so thanks again folks! Current Setup: Debian host running virtualbox with 2 guests 1. Debian squeeze perfect server with ISPConfig3 2. Debian squeeze slave mysql server for replication So my first questions are in regard to speed. Three scenarios I see: 1. Install perfect server with Squeeze and ISPConfig3 on machine itself. 2. Install Squeeze or Fedora on host, then OpenVZ WITH Ispconfig3, then install two virtual servers, 1 with perfect server squeeze and debian, 1 as squeeze with mysql slave for replication. Using ISPConfig3 to admin virtual servers instead of cli. 3. Install squeeze with Virtualbox headless, then install two virtual machines, 1 with perfect server squeeze and debian, 1 as squeeze with mysql slave for replication For sheer speed it would be option 1, but I went with virtual machines because I read that they kind of protected the main server i.e. replication slave somehow got hacked, host server, and main virtual machine would still be fine and running. then I could use a backup of hacked virtual machine to get it back up quickly etc. Speed questions are: 1. Which would be faster and EASIER for a novice who hates cli to run? 2. Is either openVZ or virtualbox inherently faster than the other? 3. It seems from the openvz user guide that it has a much finer control on host resources than virtualbox does. Would this be accurate to say? 4. Openvz userguide makes it sound like each virtual server gets raw access to the hard disk setup of host pc vs the vdi scenario with virtualbox. This should be faster for sites that rely on heavily on database correct? Now also considering the same three setups above in a backup scenario. My Current Back up scenario: 1. Once daily a script on virtual machine 1 tars all important folders sends to amazon s3 2. Once daily a script on virtual machine 2 sends copy of all databases to amazon s3 3. Once a week I shut down Virtual machines and merge snapshots (if any) then copy the vdi etc to an external hard drive for safe keeping. 4. Once a month I shut down the virtual machines and the host machine and make a bare metal backup of the host. I have also been looking at duplicity and backuppc for backing up the server itself as a whole but then I come back to that whole discussion of Live vs dead backups and how live backups stand a chance of being corrupted. Recommendations folks are truly truly appreciated. Thanks as always, Scott Cottrill
