Hi everyone
I'm new to the dedicated servers game. And I'm also new to the virtualisation of server environments, although I will be setting up a test server on our LAN very soon.
I've never looked at renting a dedicated server before, but we're increasing the number of remote workers we have so we need to improve the access speed to our mail and intranet database services. At the moment they access our mail server and PHP5/MySQL intranet over our ADSL connection.
The server package we were looking at was the Professional EG Max:
http://www.ovh.co.uk/individual/products/eg_max.xml
I wanted 8GB of memory and hardware RAID 1.
One VM will contain Zimbra for mail/groupware stuff, and another VM will be Apache/MySQL/PHP for our intranet database.
Here's some questions:
1) This server's got 64bit architecture according to the info page above.
For virtualisation OVH offers Debian Etch 4.0 32bit with VMWare, and I was thinking of installing 2 VMs of Ubuntu JeOS 8.04.
Is that the optimum? Or should I go for 32bit OS?
2) With OVH and dedicated servers in general, which ports will I get access to?
Can I use any ports I like on the server? Or am I restricted to mail ports and HTTP/SSL only?
3) Obviously each VM will need to have to have its own Static IP. Is that included with the Pro EG Max server package, or will I need to register an additional static IP?
I don't really understand the concept mentioned of IP failover and RIPE
4) Would traffic between the VMs be free/excluded from SLA Premium restrictions?
5) The FTP Backup servers, I was planning on using this to copy our email message store backups since it's connected at 100Mbps. Is this data transfer excluded from the SLA Premium restrictions?
Are the backup servers located in different datacentres to the dedicated servers?
I apologise if these are obvious questions, this is the first time I've looked into dedicated servers so don't really understand the concepts.
Thanks, B