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HomeHomeOur CommunityOur CommunityGeneral Discuss...General Discuss...So... I got a virtual serverSo... I got a virtual server
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12/7/2008 9:14 AM
 

Hi Frozen.

Although it is technologically possible to run DotNetNuke on a VPS, I would highly recommend against.

Almost two years  ago we were investigating offering virtual servers for DotNetNuke.  We spent a lot of time and money setting up the infrastructure and configuring an environment that would be really good for virtualization.  However, every single customer who was running on a VPS had performace problems (even though we very lightly loaded our VPS hardware nodes).  At the time, we couldn't figure out why everybody was having performance problems (CPU was low, Memory was good, etc) so we ended up having to pull the packages from our website.

With all of the late-breaking news about virtualization, cloud/grid computing, we decided that we wanted to take another look at virtualization solutions for DotNetNuke.  We figured that the first time we tried we might have been too early, maybe we set something up wrong, or maybe we just got a "bad egg" so to speak, so we hired Hewlett Packard Consulting to come in and tell us exactly what we needed, the hardware we needed to buy, what virtualization software we should use (HyperV, VMWare, Virtuozzo), how many VPSs per server and all of that.  The results, however, weren't what we or HP were expecting.

For one month HP collected CPU, memory, disk IO, bus load, and a lot of other information on 300 servers that were randomly selected from our infrastructure.  This included shared hosting servers as well as dedicated servers for customers who gave us permission to collected usage information from their servers.  What we learned:  If run inside of a virtualization environment, DotNetNuke performs very poorly when compared to either a shared or dedicated solution.  We're working on getting permission from HP to publish the study, however, here's the jist of why it doesn't work good:

1)  DotNetNuke is a very "chatty" application.  It talks to different I/O services (memory, cache, bus, network services) a LOT.
2)  When DotNetNuke is "talking" instead of having a small number of "give me LOTS of data" requests, it has an extremely high volume of "give me little bits of data" requests.  (This is not just measuring talking to the SQL server, we're talking about bus IO, disk throughput, etc)
3)  The relitive cost of virtualizing small IO requests is extremely high compared with the relitive cost of virtualizing large IO requests.  This is confusing, but here's an example of what I mean:
Have you ever noticed that when uploading files via FTP, it takes longer to upload 1000-1k files than it does to upload 1-1mb file?  That is because each file upload basically has a "header" and a "footer" that get attached to the "here is data" upload command, and when you're working with small files, that header could be just as large (if not larger) than the actual file contents themselves.

After the study was done, we went out to lunch with HP and they pretty much said "Hey, we would love to sell you a $250,000 virtualization solution but it just simply won't work well for your needs."

With all that being said, your DotNetNuke VPS site may run fine for you if you're the only person running DotnetNuke on your hardware node, however if other people on your hardware node are running DNN, you will start to noticeperformance problems.

 
New Post
12/7/2008 3:32 PM
 

Thanks Tony for that post - very educational!!  Hopefully you get the permission from HP to share more with the community.

I am certainly no expert in this area (or any DNN area for that matter! -grin) but I had a dedicated server with 1gb of ram. It has the database on the same server and it ran close to 700mb of ram with just the basic parts - Windows XP, IIS, asp.net, DNN, and SQL server.

I just finished setting up my own local host using VMware. I have 4gb of ram and gave the guest machine 2gb and host 2gb. Host operating system is Vista Ultimate x64 and my DNN guest operating system is Vista Ultimate x32 (set up for performace with eye candy turned off). Base virtual machine is using 480mb of ram. Opening a Firefox window and accessing one DNN 4.9 install (base install with three addtional modules - Xmod, OWS, and one more) the machine is using 640mb of ram with Firefox consuming 38mb of that.  Accessing two DNN installs at the same time (second is base install only) it goes to 700mb ram with Firefox consuming 48mb of that. For grins I just restarted and opened up DNN 5.rc (base install) by itself  - 595mb ram with Firefox consuming 23mb. I guess I could get those numbers down a little bit by using Windows XP or striping the Vista OS using vlite but since it works fine as is for a development machine I haven't taken the time.

With regards to Frozen's original post I wonder how one of the cloud options like Mosso that apprently automatically scale and cost about the same as a VPS would fair??  I know Mitch has some experience with Mosso - what say you?

Greg

 
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12/7/2008 4:24 PM
 

I am just going to throw a little bit of my $0.02 in here now, and I hope to follow up with a more detailed blog posting in a little bit if anyone is interested.  (email me at msellers@iowacomputergurus.com for any more information or to request that I get that blog post done sooner rather than later).

As many of you know I have had experience with pretty much all there is to offer in regards to hosting solutions for DotNetNuke.  I've worked with Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Server Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, and even cloud computing solutions such as Mosso.

In my experience I have concluded that I will agree to a certain point with the above posters that you must select the "right choice" for the specific implementation.  But I will add to this that proper building and configuration of ones sites can make or break a hosting solution.

First and foremost out of all of this, It is really possible to run DNN on a VPS solution, it works, and works well.

Many people have visited my sites in the past and noticed that they "load really fast".  This is due to optimizations not only in the power of the server, but the modules, skins, performance settings, and other aspects of the site.

Many people would be scared to know that my sites are all hosted on 1 single VPS server with 1Gb of ram.  On that box I have the following

2 DotNetNuke Installs (one with 5 portals) - Total daily traffic around 1200 visitors, peak at about 3000 on one day
1 BugNet Installation - THis is my bug tracking system, based on 3.x DNN
1 Smarter Track Installation - This is my support system for clients
1 Smater Mail Installation - For email
8 Other .NET sites hosted for various purposes
1 Source control application

I also have SQL Server on the same box, and everything loads and works perfect, all the time, so don't say that it can't be done.  I still have memory to spare as well, and as you can see, my sites do NOT suffer from this configuration.

I'm going to try and work up a blog posting about this soon, but if anyone has questions let me know, I've done this before and it works!


-Mitchel Sellers
Microsoft MVP, ASPInsider, DNN MVP
CEO/Director of Development - IowaComputerGurus Inc.
LinkedIn Profile

Visit mitchelsellers.com for my mostly DNN Blog and support forum.

Visit IowaComputerGurus.com for free DNN Modules, DNN Performance Tips, DNN Consulting Quotes, and DNN Technical Support Services
 
New Post
12/7/2008 8:56 PM
 

  Processor Type - Quad Core  

 

Xeon 2.66
 
 
  Percent (%) of 1 Core  
 
50%
 
 
  Memory (RAM)  
 
512 MB
 
 
  Storage Amount  
 
20 GB

I have 5 DNN installs on this one and nothing else.

Should get a addon of 1GB Ram?

 
New Post
12/7/2008 9:31 PM
 

You should really consider getting a physical server instead of a virtual, however, I would say that you should get AT LEAST an extra gig of ram.

Also, make sure that is one GB of physical RAM and not one GB of virtual ram.

Here's something that I learned from HP when we were doing our study as well:

Most companies implementing VPSes "oversubscribe" their VPS hardware nodes.  To give you an idea of what this means, let's say that I have a physical server with the following specs:

Quad Core Xeon x2 (Dual Processor)
8GB Ram
500 GB RAID 1

According to HP, it would not be unreasonable to carve that into at least 8 VPSes each with 2GB of RAM.  Now, if you do the math here, 8VPSes * 2GB of ram = 16GB of ram but our server only has 8GB of ram in it.  The way that this is handled is that the server basically allocates off a section of the hard drive ( called teh page file) and pretends that it is memory for the VPSes.  Although this will solve some problems and let you run applications in the VPS that have a higher memory requirement, it absolutely kills your performance.

Take a look at this URL to understand more what I mean about physical vs virtual memory:

http://www.terryscomputertips.com/computers/speed-of-virtual-memory-vs-RAM.php

 

 
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