Cloud host needed

I

Ipwn 4

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I am looking for a local host that can setup a server 2012 enviroment for me with 20 remote cals and 20 office std cals.

Pretty much want to turn my network in to dumb terminals and work in the cloud so jhb hosting is essential.
 
Ipwn 4 said:
I am looking for a local host that can setup a server 2012 enviroment for me with 20 remote cals and 20 office std cals.

Pretty much want to turn my network in to dumb terminals and work in the cloud so jhb hosting is essential.
Click to expand...

Good luck with that.
 
deweyzeph said:
Good luck with that.
Click to expand...

Its actually quite simple, I have an R720 that is filled to capacity. Dont want a second one as the management becomes a bit much.... would prefer to outsource.

Issue is SPLA, very few ISP's offer office with their servers and those who do rip you off on the virtual hw.
 
encrypted said:
Why not work off 1 Local windows server that backs up remotely.

Cheaper.
Works Better.
Faster.
More Reliable.
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If something goes wrong it goes down. I want a second vm up as soon as the first one dies....
 
Speaking as someone who has administered Terminal servers used in this fashion in the past - had just under 500 users over a couple of loadbalanced servers, some users on site, some remote - I'll tell you this: It's extremely easy for such a solution to really suck.

I also don't think you'll get the kind of performance you need. Using a web browser and MS Office at work can make my i7 with 4GB RAM crawl at times. A cloud server with 4GB RAM isn't going to have anywhere near the same performance, and you'll have to scale it 20 times to cope with 20 users.

You mention an R720 that's "filled to capacity" - that's a serious piece of kit. If you'll looking to offload from that, cloud is the wrong place to look.
 
koffiejunkie said:
Speaking as someone who has administered Terminal servers used in this fashion in the past - had just under 500 users over a couple of loadbalanced servers, some users on site, some remote - I'll tell you this: It's extremely easy for such a solution to really suck.

I also don't think you'll get the kind of performance you need. Using a web browser and MS Office at work can make my i7 with 4GB RAM crawl at times. A cloud server with 4GB RAM isn't going to have anywhere near the same performance, and you'll have to scale it 20 times to cope with 20 users.

You mention an R720 that's "filled to capacity" - that's a serious piece of kit. If you'll looking to offload from that, cloud is the wrong place to look.
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the R720 is hosted at our offices on a dedicated 10mb fibre connection, clients have been loving the idea of having their accountants work in the cloud, they all have cheap desktops with nothing more then a shortcut to remote access on the desktop. We are looking at sticking it into a dc but don't want to invest in a second one. With the current costs of hosting(take IS as an example) the TOC comes down quite a bit when someone else is responsible for the hardware side of things and we only administrate the OS.

You say the specs i have mentioned seems low yet in the tests we have performed a basic 1 vCPU 1GB RAM server has coped shockingly well with 5 remote users running pastel and outlook(.pst's < 1GB each). It depends very much on how the VM environment is configured and off course the quality of the underlying hardware. With the R720 you have 2x Intel Xeon E5-2640 15MB processors, 2 vCPU's from there can't really be compared with a dual core i3 as and example, the storage(raided SAS drives) make a huge difference when compared to the time it take to read data off a sata hdd.

I've currently got a POC where the latency is around 15-25ms over std ADSL, the perception of performance is close to that of a local server(mainly due to the 100mb breakout and the server being <60km from me/ my clients).

Thanks for your input, if you know of any nice benchmarks please let me know. We need some solid tests to make a proper conclusion, replicating a test environment is being to become painful when you have 10 servers to test.
 
Remote Apps suck.

That's my professional opinion based on real user testing. If you want the majority of your workload to be remote-friendly, replace your desktop software with web apps.
 
isp-insider said:
oooh look, more spam from mr ANT Hosting
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Sigh what a noob....

Lesson one when it comes to a web based business, do not get yourself banned of the biggest forum in your industry, in a few weeks people are going to google Ant Hosting (you see what I did there) and find all these posts that he is a spammer. And no one trusts spammers....
 
Ipwn 4 said:
Sigh what a noob....

Lesson one when it comes to a web based business, do not get yourself banned of the biggest forum in your industry, in a few weeks people are going to google Ant Hosting (you see what I did there) and find all these posts that he is a spammer. And no one trusts spammers....
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Well said.
 
Virtual servers seemed a Godsend when I first saw them appearing in commercial easy to setup and light on the wallet packages. So obviously I jumped at the opportunity to get one, and got an entry level vps, from one of the local isp's. Hardware seemed good, wrote some benchmarks, seeing as I wanted to mainly use it for demos and code tests. I soon realized the performance is way off par.

This could be due to a couple of things, over selling the physical server and hosting too many vps' on the machine. Disk IO is a bitch, if they don't give you a physical drive, access time, read and write performance is shared so is inode limits and such.

I am also still confused by the fact that they tell you 1vCPU or something similar to explain the processors, what are the specs of this so called vCPU, is it a dedicated processor core or is it a shared compute instance, probably not a physical core, this means memory bus and bandwidth is also shared between God knows how many people. Hopefully the backing hardware is using hardware virtualization.

Also some of these "servers" only have one or two physical NIC's they say 100mbs link wich is not a lie, they can show you one 100mbs link serving 20 vps's. My VPS had almost no network throughput. Updates and speed test's from the server had lots of spikes and fluctuated too much. I did some iftop tests and saw major traffic originating and terminating from other vps's on the network. So I firewalled the crap out of it. Made some difference but not much.

So for me this is ok. I get lots of 500 errors on a low traffic blog i host, with just wordpress php mysql. I have an old system running at home with half the spec and an adsl line using dynamic dns, and it is much faster than this.
 
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Hi ASS_SAZiN,

Unfortunately overselling is a very common problem within the industry as most ISP's would like to maximize the ROI of their hardware and often overload their servers. I agree the vCPU can be somewhat confusing but 1 CPU core would normally be shared between 2 and 6 VPS clients depending on the host.

The disk IO bottleneck can be avoided by using a fast RAID10 or SSD local disk setup, but unfortunately some clients disk usage can become a problem and can reduce the entire node IOPS.

The key is monitoring your infrastructure and moving VPS's between hosts nodes to find a balance, so all clients achieve good performance.
 
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