Hetzner

I'll setup a 3 node Ganeti cluster on Hetzners root servers, to run static and Drupal based sites for friends and NGOs. Ganeti is designed to facilitate cluster management of virtual servers (the "instances") using commodity hardware (the "nodes"). It provides fast and simple recovery after physical failures, disk creation management, operating system installation, startup, shutdown, and failover between physical systems.

In the second part of the series I'm going to setup routed networking on a root server of Hetzner, for KVM based virtualization and with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS guests. These guests will be webservers and database-servers, connected by private LAN with internal bridge NAT-ed to eth0 of the host. Shorewall and Fail2ban will help to get the proper networking in place, next to security. Finally, a Pound load balancer (reverse proxy) with one additional public IP, will be setup, as well.

In this article I document how I installed Proxmox VE on Hetzners root server. Proxmox Virtualisation Environment is an free, open source virtualization platform, supporting OpenVZ and KVM, high availability clusters, storage and networking model, web interface for management, and has a fine graded user authentication system.

After several years of web hosting at servage.net, I decided to move one step further and setup my own Drupal hosting solution on a Hetzner root server, using KVM virtualization and Aegir. This change has nothing to do with servage.net, their web hosting service is still perfect, cost and quality is OK. I just wanted to have something more to play.