[OpenIndiana-discuss] Anyone running OI on VPS?

[Joshua M. Clulow]

On Thu, 25 Feb 2021 at 08:33, Peter Tribble <peter.tribble at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Most of illumos.org is hosted in virtual machines on AWS right now,
running under OmniOS.  There is also a small footprint at
DigitalOcean, where it was a bit easier to send mail.

> > 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).

I have several small virtual machines running illumos distributions.
The $5/month plan at DigitalOcean has 1GB of RAM and 25GB of disk --
which is enough to get some work done.  Especially with compression
enabled on the root pool.

> > 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.

I have successfully used pkg(1) in a VM with only 512MB of RAM.  It
does tend to swap a little.  1GB is probably better!

> > 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.

It is actually relatively easy to produce a pre-installed disk image
of an IPS distribution.  I have some example scripts I use to produce
OmniOS images:

    https://github.com/jclulow/omnios-image-builder/

The scripts use a tool I put together that is a bit like the old
Distribution Constructor:

    https://github.com/illumos/image-builder

It is not yet documented, but the scripts demonstrate usage at least.
You can upload those disk images to Digital Ocean directly using their
custom image facility, or upload them to AWS through a clumsy and
heavily-laboured set of interfaces (as is a theme with AWS).  I
suspect it would be easy to get Vultr or other bargain basement
providers working as well.

> > 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.

I believe GCE still requires a Virtio SCSI driver, which I haven't
quite finished -- though I have a prototype that worked on some level,
enough to demonstrate that GCE was possible.

DigitalOcean and AWS are relatively easy, though.  I have added
support to our illumos metadata agent for those platforms:

    https://github.com/illumos/metadata-agent

This agent is a very basic, illumos-specific replacement for
cloud-init.  It configures networking, expands the root disk,
optionally runs a user-provided start script, etc.  It is included by
the scripts in my "omnios-image-builder" repository, so that those
disk images are then self-configuring.


Cheers.

-- 
Joshua M. Clulow
http://blog.sysmgr.org