[OpenIndiana-discuss] Anyone running OI on VPS?

[Peter Tribble]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 3:47 PM cretin1997 via openindiana-discuss <
openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:

> Do you run OI on VPS or dedicated server?
>

I run other illumos distributions (OmniOS, Tribblix) on dedicated hardware,
VPS providers,
and the cloud.


> Does OI suitable to run on a VPS at all?
>

Certainly. Like anything, provided you meet the requirements.


> It seems normal cheap VPS plan of many host providers will be not enough.
> OI takes much more disk space than Linux because of Boot Environments.


That varies. You can trim boot environments, so they don't take that much
space.
And I find Linux distributions generally to chew through a lot of space,
especially
as you get all sorts of odd packages installed unnecessarily because
they're thought
to be required (turning off recommends can help).


> So it seems I will need to upgrade the storage plan. OI also needs more
> memory to work because of pkg so I will need more memory, too. This end up
> with a not cheap at all VPS whose resources (cores, memory, storage space)
> will be same same as my home PC.
>
> If it's so, does a dedicate server should be more preferred?
>

Not really, it's true that you might struggle with the smaller VPS sizing,
but even if you have to avoid those you can still go a lot smaller than
a dedicated server.


> But if it's the case, why someone consider running OI in the first place
> instead of Linux since Linux is a much cheaper option?
>

As always, choose whichever option best serves your needs.


> I'm talking about normal KVM host providers here.
>

The things that can cause problems are (a) if they force virtio-scsi, which
we don;t
yet have, or (b) if they don't offer some sort of install from ISO option,
which can be
worked around in some cases.


> I have no idea about the cloud (AWS, GCE, Azure,...) at all.
>

I'm not aware of AMIs for OI, but they're not hard to makes, so AWS
wouldn't be a problem. I've run OmniOS on Azure; I've not run any illumos
on GCE myself, but I think it's possible.

-- 
-Peter Tribble
http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/