Hi !
I'm about to deploy a new server that will host several virtual host for mainly website hosting purposes. My server will be a Xeon 3440 or 3450 with 32 gigs of ram (the max of that board). So I will have 8 logical cores. At the moment, I don't know how many vms I will have, in the order of 5 or 6.
I am quite new to managing VMs, I did play alot with them over the course of the last couple of weeks. I used kvm to startup and manage my vms and my main source of info was this blog entry : http://blog.mattbrock.co.uk/2012/02/12/virtualisation-with-kvm-and-lvm-on-ce...
I have some general questions about VM.
If I set vcpu let's say to 2-3 for a single vm, does this mean that those CPU are dedicated to that vm or many vm can share the same physicial cpus ?
So, I was wondering what's the best for managing storage for VMs ? I see mostly recomandations for LV for storing VM's disks. It seem to helps to create snapshots for backup purposes. Is this the fastest way of creating backups ? And will data access be faster that if I use regular files ?
In my case, the "main" setup of each vm is rather simple. The minimal OS, updates, my own httpd, my own php a couple of other packages. So restoring a VM from scratch can take less than an hour. So I was thinking of not taking snapshot of the whole VM and only sync the data partition.
As for the guest paritions, I am accustomed of separating my servers disks with separate /, /usr, /var, /home and /data partitions. I can't recall today why I started doing this, 15 years ago, but I still like it that way and continue to do so. Do I still "need" to do this with VMs ?
Thanks for the help !