Running virtual machines on it
A dedicated server is the natural home for a hypervisor: all the cores are yours and nothing else is scheduled on the hardware.
Why bare metal suits this
Nested virtualisation on someone else's cloud is slow and unpredictable. Here the machine is yours: the CPU, the memory channels and the disks are not shared with anybody, so your virtual machines get what you give them. We do not count containers and we do not care how you carve the box up.
Enabling the extensions
Virtualisation extensions are on by default on most of our builds. If
lscpu | grep Virtualization comes back empty, switch them on in the BIOS
through remote KVM — no ticket needed.
Networking your guests
Two common routes. Give each guest a public address, which means asking us for extra addresses and bridging them. Or NAT everything behind the host address and forward the ports you need, which costs you no addresses at all.
IPv6 is the easy one: ask and you get room, so every guest can have a real address. See getting IPv6 running.
Watch the memory, not the cores
Overcommitting cores is usually fine. Overcommitting memory is how a host starts swapping and every guest on it gets slow at once. Leave headroom for the host, and remember ZFS or a cache layer wants its share too.
If you resell those guests
Everything in our acceptable use policy applies to what your customers do, just as it applies to you. Keep an abuse address that you actually read.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base