Virtualbox as a VPS host.

[redrage]

I'm currently using VirtualBox on an Ubuntu Server host to setup a smallish VPS setup. Currently just my sites but possibly a few others.

It runs pretty good and extremely easy to move around, but a couple things i noticed is that you can't change the drive size on the fly and there doesn't seem to be a way to limit network bandwidth.

Is there another free cross platform VM solution that does this? Or better yet have any tricks to add these features to VBox?

 

[fantabulous]

Handwavy, and I don't have a VirtualBox setup to verify some points.

For disk resizes, I recall VirtualBox is able to use raw block devices. Putting the guests on LVM volumes might be all you need, although the guest may not actually see the increased volume size without a reboot.

iptables seems to be able to handle bandwidth limiting, and I believe VirtualBox will create a bridge device for each guest. The specifics are a bit beyond my abilities with iptables, though.

 

[paret0]

OP needs sum SunOS magic...

Solaris or OI and its Crossbow network stack will allow you to run multiple 64-bit VBox guests in single-application (VBox) Zones where you can allocate per zone caps and limits for network and cpu (and storage, and lots of other things).
You can create as many virtual nics as you want, pretty much effortlessly, and bridge every VBox guest to one or more vnics.


This guy nails it: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=53317&p=244758#p244758



You can do most of these things in Linux and BSD too, but why?

 

[redrage]

changing drive size.. sucks but creating another drive and adding a mount point to it i guess is what i'm stuck doing, no biggie i don't see me doing this often.

I'll have to check into traffic shaping. I haven't done anything like that in many years and that was on a device built to do it lol.

I only plan on creating enough to offset the cost of the dedicated box some to people who hopefully won't exploit my cheap vps setups lol.