On Sun, 14 Mar 2004, Bohdan Tashchuk wrote:
Question: Why can't a provider sell virtual PC colocation, instead of physical PC colocation?
Several do. We nearly bought a failing one that was doing alot of this with a commercial Linux virtualization product.
So instead of 40 physical machines per rack, why can't it be 80 or 160 or even more virtual machines, running on 40 physical Linux boxes? I think the economics could shift significantly under those circumstances.
During the short time we managed their network and systems, I had to poke around on a couple of the virtual machines to fix customer issues. I don't remember how many virtual machines they ran per physical machine, but IIRC, they were all P4's with several GB of RAM. Each customer got root and their own IPs on what appeared to them to be a dedicated server. IIRC, Paul was suggesting part of the value in the $50/month colo deal was that customers were motivated to be good else you keep their server or ebay it. You lose that with the virtual private server model...but does anyone actually have in their contract/AUP that AUP violators will forfeit their hardware? We've kicked some spammer colo customers where I'd love to have had such a clause. I only know of one case where we did that...and it was for non-payment. The customer's hardware was worth less than their balance, so they chose to simply write us off. Being located in another country, it wasn't worth the effort to try extracting $ from them. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis *jlewis@lewis.org*| I route Senior Network Engineer | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________