I'm probably going to be colocating a server somewhere in London soon. Given the costs of colo in the UK I really only want to use 1U of rack space. I also however could really do with having two servers, because I want both a Linux server and a Win2k server.

Last time I was looking into this I found a 1U server that contained two separate PCs, with two floppy drives, two CDROMs, two PSUs and two hard disks. This would be ideal for my purposes.

The problem is I can't find the server now. All my google searches for dual server 1U boxes are swamped with dual CPU boxes...

Does anyone out there know where I can get such a beast ? Has anyone used one of these boxes, do they recommend them ?

P.S. anyone used the services of http://www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk/prices-colo.shtml as they are the people I'm thinking of going with. They do at least seem to have reasonable uptime on their own webserver http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.blackcatnetworks.co.uk

There was the Dual-Server X2 from PSI-Domain, but they appear to be out of business now. It also looks like it wasn't a very professional chassis, but just a metal box 1.75" tall.

Wait. Here's another. And that one's from a company apparently still in business.

How much does rackspace cost? Any suggestions on colocation facities?

In 3-4 months, I'm going to need to rent space for a database server (dual processor with 1-2gB ramdisk, etc.). Low bandwidth requirements (20 kB up/down 24/7), but high uptime and good latency requirements (<50 ms).

How did you decide on where to host your stuff?

-Biscuits

Hm... The best site I have seen for this sort of things is www.itox.com, but... The site is not there... They had among other things a "4 servers in a 1U"-Unit. (I got some stuff from them earlier)

Look for sites with Mini-ITX or FlexATX motherboards.

Marius (Escort Cab + Mark II)

How much does rackspace cost? Any suggestions on colocation facities?

The cost of colo rackspace is normally made up of two main elements, the two elements being the physical space you need and the bandwidth you need.

The actual costs (in the UK at least) vary a great deal, with 1U of space and 10GB of bandwidth a month costining anywhere between 50 quid and several hundred quid.

Bandwidth is priced in one of two ways, either on the total amount of bandwidth you use in a month, or your bandwidth is permanently fixed at a particular level. The former gives you more flexiblity, but at the risk of running up high monthly bandwidth costs. The later gives you a known cost each month, but if lots of people hit your server at once things might get slow.

How did you decide on where to host your stuff?

On price mainly, I need something cheap. At the moment I am paying 100 quid a month for a business ADSL line, which I host my DNS/mail/WWW on the end of. I want to replace this with a 30 quid a month consumer ADSL line and then move my servers to a colo, so the colo needs to cost less than 70 quid a month...

However, as far as I can see the guys at BlackCatNetworks also seem to know what they are doing and I haven't managed to find any unhappy customers.

At 41 quid a month (if you pay yearly) they are the cheapest I have found for 1U and 10 GB a month (that's bytes not bits by the way). They charge 15 quid a month for each extra U and 5 quid per GB. Unusually they also include access to a APC MasterSwitch in the price so that you can reboot your server if it has gone tits up, most people charge extra for this.

If you search on google for "uk colocation" you will find plentty of others, but most start at nearer 100 quid a month for a similar package.

N.B. I have not yet used BlackCatNetworks, or in fact any other colo provider.

I've got ADSL with Andrews & Arnold and they've been excellent. Whenever there is a problem all I do is give them a quick call and they normally sort it out within an hour. All other times have been due to BT screwing up somewhere.
They also do colocation but it's £100 for a 1U server with 100GBit a month allocation. They've got a 100Mbps link to the outside world which is better than the BlackCatNetworks one however.

- Trevor

What a beautiful coincidence, A&A is also who I will be moving my ADSL line to. I'm moving from a 1Mb Easynet line to A&A's light 512kb one.

I saw their 100 quid service and was thinking about talking to Adrian to see if there was any flexibility on the price. However, after thinking about it I would probably prefer to have my colo with a different provider anyway. I don't like having all my eggs in the same basket, however good the basket appears.

That's why I have two separate secondary DNS suppliers and backup MX separate from my ISP. If I go with this change my setup will be spread across five difference service providers.

The RackSaver one looks pretty good. I suspect it will work out more expensive than I would like though.

I don't suppose anyone has any experience of using VMWare to run Win2k server under Linux ? What effect does it have on Linux's stability ? And how well does PCAnywhere/VNC run on Win2k under VMWare (as I would need some way to control the Win2k virtual machine remotely.

That way for $300 I could have a Win2k server in the same normal priced 1U box as the Linux server.

Or I could just resort to my original plan of having the Win2k box at the end of my DSL line.

I ran Win2k under VMWare when Win2k first came out, but not in a production environment. Anyway, it ran quite well. I never had any problems with it at all. They've come out with several newer VMWare releases since then, and I can't imagine that stability has worsened. The only problem I can think of is that I don't know of a way right offhand to get it to run on bootup, as I don't know if VMWare will run without a display. You might have to run an Xvfb for VMWare to display in.

In addition, I ran VNC server on the Win2k machine and never had any problems with that, either.

Sounds promising.

I guess at worst, after the server had booted I could start a remote X session over ssh, load VMWare and then disconnect. Nothing running on the Win2k VM is going to be critical enough for it to be the end of the world if it doesn't come up automatically after a reboot (especially as I only reboot my Linux boxes about once a year).

I think it would probably work just fine with Xvfb. The problem with pretty much any other method is that, usually, X setups want a user to be logged in before they start up. I've successfully run other stuff that needed X (read Java) against Xvfb without needing a user to log in.

I have to admit my X knowledge is very limited...

(I know just enough about it to know I don't like it)

So I'll take a look at Xvfb. Thanks Bitt.

Of course, all I need is about a 2U server with 100 mbit (not 100 gbit!) a month. It is just the 99.999% uptime and low latency I'm concerned about. I have a few months to find a good US colocation facility.

-Biscuits

Xvfb is X Virtual Frame Buffer. That is, it doesn't use any real graphical hardware to display X. It just uses system memory. That way, you can have an X server running that doesn't require any hardware (if you had a serial console only, like under many big Unix boxes) and doesn't interfere with whatever hardware you might already be using for other purposes (like the standard text console for Linux and other PeeCee Unices which runs on what's usually your only graphics hardware).

The idea is that you can start up Xvfb and have your X-requiring processes use it as their DISPLAY. Anything they draw never gets drawn anywhere you can see, so you have to make sure that they don't need any interaction. If they do, you might need to look into using Xvnc, so that you could interact with it over VNC, if needed (in fact, I believe that Xvnc might use Xvfb under the covers). But you should be able to get a VMWare session set up so that it can start up on its own with no interaction needed, I think.

Company I work for went with Adept Web, a small company who were then bought out by IZR Solutions - both have given very good service. We are on the 20:1 521k business service for about £60/month. I have also heard very good things about A&A and also Nildram, but since Adept was owned by the boss' friend I didn't have much choice.

We have a dedicated server with Netscalibur who have been pretty good, save for a couple of weeks back when the NIC blew up in the Compaq server (NonStop, lol!) and they took an hour just to get their asses into Telehouse Docklands. They are not in this league of pricing though, and Telehouse rental is much more than RedBus.

You could try posting the prices on alt.internet.providers.uk and see if anyone can beat it - I doubt anyone could do anything more than reduce the additional bandwidth charges though.

I am using Tiscali 2-way satellite here (I started a 3 month trial last March and they haven't asked me for any money yet). It's not recommended unless you are really desperate.

Gareth

Company I work for went with Adept Web, a small company who were then bought out by IZR Solutions - both have given very good service. We are on the 20:1 521k business service for about £60/month. I have also heard very good things about A&A and also Nildram, but since Adept was owned by the boss' friend I didn't have much choice.

One thing I dread is choosing a colo company and then have them get bought out by someone else a couple of months later.

Probably a lucky miss with Nildram, they have been having nightmares recently because they didn't allow enough time before ordering their next central line from BT. BT took longer than they should have to install it (as expected) and Nildram ADSL customers suffered to a little too much contention for a while.

Adrian at A&A got caught out like this soon after ADSL first started, which is why this time he order the next central line about six months before he needed it. It still took BT 5 weeks longer than it should have to get it installed.

VMware is definitely a good option. If you put that on a dual-processor box (or just a P4 hyperthreading box), the OS's native multithreading will keep everything humming along nicely. VMware ESX Server runs on the bare metal, while the GSX Server runs on a host OS like Linux. My only experience is running the "Workstation" product, but it does work like a charm.

If you really want two separate CPUs, maybe you can find a co-lo vendor that offers "blade" servers. These sorts of servers are offered by many vendors. A typical offering would be 16 vertically-mounted mini-motherboards in a 2U or 3U chassis. They wedge laptop hard drives and laptop CPUs in there to keep power consumption and heat generation down. If you don't have particularly high performance requirements, this might be perfect for you.

I've been really happy with Nildram, I'm still getting really good download speeds and it's been super reliable. Would definately recommend them.

They've come out with several newer VMWare releases since then, and I can't imagine that stability has worsened....

A while back, I ran Win2K under VMWare 2.0 on Linux and had problems as I was trying to keep a real multi-boot configuration (with Win2K pre-installed on a separate partition).

This time around, I decided to forego the multi-boot config and am running Win2K (for certain work apps) under VMWare Workstation 3.2 using a virtual disk and all is well. I'm even able to IPSec tunnel from Win2K over the VMWare virtual NAT and then a second (router NAT) to connect to work.

The only problem I can think of is that I don't know of a way right offhand to get it to run on bootup, as I don't know if VMWare will run without a display.

Interesting issue. I'll try it, but I expect you are right.

One problem. The Win2K virtual machine's clock is totally wacko. It will not sync with the Linux host nmachine through VMWare's BIOS. Using NTP from the Win2K guest OS (the workaround suggested by VMWare) does not work, at least for me. VMware says this will be fixed in version 4, but I want to know if I have to pay for an upgrade just for this bug fix! Anyhow, if Win2k clock/timestamps are important to your application, this might be an issue.

The place I'm currently using for colocation is great. They specialise in ASP hosting, and I'm his smallest customer. I'm getting away with $125/mbits 95% average and 3U (2 servers) for $200 a month.

I've seen prices for less all over the country, but I wanted my $3000 investments closer to me. For instance in some places in Miami you can get $60mbit/s per month.

1Mbit/s usually translates out to 316GByte of total bandwidth per month. I average about 100Kbit/s on both of my boxen.

The next place that would offer that to me in the Denver area was $500+

Right now I'm using a 2U for my main box, dual Athlon MP 1900's, and my 1U box is a PIII 800.

I've been super impressed by my colocation, and this is the third one I've been with in a year, but I'll be with this guy for a while.

You really shouldn't be paying more than $50 per U at most, and average should be around $35 per U, here in the states at least. For the UK I've seen around 40

A while back, I ran Win2K under VMWare 2.0 on Linux and had problems as I was trying to keep a real multi-boot configuration (with Win2K pre-installed on a separate partition).

Good point. I never could get that sort of thing to work.

First off, it doesn't like to be booted back and forth, as its hardware keeps changing, which confuses the bejeezus out of Windows.

Secondly, even after I gave up trying to boot it natively, it still never quite worked right from its own partition. It just worked a hell of a lot better from a virtual disk. And the redo-able disk (or whatever it's called) that they have is really cool. It'll keep your Windows install from ever getting corrupted.

I don't ever remember having clock issues, but, then I wasn't paying a lot of attention. I can't imagine why NTP wouldn't work right.

To add to the other replies yuo have received:
I used to run my laptop with two native partitions one with linux and the other one upgrading win95-win98-WinNT-win2k. This worked very well, and I ran windows under vmware on Linux, and I ran Linux under VMware on WinNT/2k and both combinations at the same time, i.e. I could run windows or Linux as the host OS and the other one as the native OS, and change as I wanted, just by rebooting.

I must admit this was not very easy to set up, but when I finally got it to work, it worked very well.

Unfortunately, the laptop got stolen, and the backup server crashed a few days later, so all my setup is gone.

The stability was super. Never had any problems with anything. Just remember that VMware will equire large amounts of memory. Take what you normally would need, double it and add 20MB. Runs perfectly well on a single CPU machine, or any other number of CPUs. You'll want the workstation version, the others are really very expensive.

VNC is no problem whatsoever. I think the latest versions can be started from a command-line, without requiring X. And automatically starting it when booting should be no big deal to set up.

Basically, I feel VMWare is the best Os-type-of-software since OS/370.

But... without a laptop, I end up using two PCs instead, one with linux and one with windows.... (The linux machine is a pentiom MMX, and both have a screen ersolution of 640x480... guess what's on my present wishlist if I ever get hold of some money... /me hates Temporary layoffs))

Marius (Escort Cab + Mark II)