Best practises in virtualising NethServer

Hi there,

I’m going the virtual way with nethserver, mainly for the ease of undoing things in the case something goes wrong and being able to easily test new configurations before going in production.

Questions :

  • Would you use Nethserver as a host or anything else ?
  • Given that the host server isn’t that strong (4 gigs RAM), would you separate some functions between virtual nethservers ?

Our main functions would be :

  • File server along with Nextcloud
  • AD
  • Sogo server
  • Web server for some lightweight internal apps
  • Network gateway. I’m considering using pfsense for this since I’d like to use the captive portal feature.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Matthieu

Sorry for the late response.
I suggest taking a look at those discussions to collect some examples

In addition, our virtualization guides would help
http://wiki.nethserver.org/doku.php?id=userguide:installation_methods

Finally, I’d like to tag here some experts like @sjafka @hunv @Bluelake @ohifra @mansoor.tariq jay_redstone

Thanks @alefattorini for the nice insights. I’m aware that this question goes well beyond nethserver itself. I’m still learning a lot in this field.

1 Like

Don’t be afraid to ask, we are all here for that

You’re asking a lot of 4 gB. How many cores do you have? If you’re going to stick with that hardware then you could install Nethserver on the hardware as your host os with the kvm module. Then, I would create one NS vm with all your functions and allocate to it all of the memory minus about a 1/2 gB.
As a rule, for security and redundancy, I do not mix gateway functions with server functions in the same instance.

To stress, short of using this hardware for a dedicated test lab, and having other hardware for production, you’re asking an awful lot of 4gB for virtualization.

Might be true. Budget constraint as you guessed already :wink:

That said, I was counting on the fact that an initial installation with the virtual machine manager only runs on 500 Mo, leaving 3 Go for another instance of nethserver and 500 Mo for pfsense, and 500 Mo free for the host.

Meanwhile I found out that our Dell PowerEdge 840 and its Quad cores Intel Xeon 3 Ghz wasn’t supporting VT/D, making this machine useless as VM host.

Thanks for your input.