Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2011 11:12:37 +0200 From: Valentin Bud <valentin.bud@gmail.com> To: freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Custom FreeBSD "appliance" Message-ID: <AANLkTin5j6hZREbdk4gm9BguGsSV4QNj8bTZrvLt97As@mail.gmail.com>
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Hello community, We have started using virtualization platforms at work, a mix of ESXi and KVM. Until now I had no problems running FreeBSD (full ZFS) as a guest on neither of them. Some might say this is not optimal neither safe but we have a dedicated server (10 GB RAM, Intel Quad Core) running 8-STABLE with ZFS for backing up all the VMs that we have. We have quite a few apps we use, from Apache to MySQL, ghostscript and others. Until I've heard of virtualization all the apps were running on a single dedicated server. I remember once I had to update some appX which depended on some libX-new-version and the other appY depended on libX-past-version. I had to roll back the update, quite a pain and some downtime. No more of that when I've heard about jails. At first I've used jails,which are great (thanks FreeBSD for this). I do use them in some parts of the environment and I am very happy with them. We chose KVM/ESXi because we have a mixture of debian, Windows and FreeBSD machines we need to do the job. I have been thinking lately to build specialized robots (as I call them) for a certain task. A specialized robot for me is a custom FreeBSD install with a certain package (eg. MySQL), with all the tuning done for that particular app, starting from FS to memory optimization, network optimization and the like. What do you think about this? I would like to build that custom install *exactly* with what's needed by that particular app, no more no less. Where would be a great place to start? I suppose the build system and src.conf would be a start. How can I find what a certain app really needs? For example if I want to build a robot that does outgoing SMTP using postfix, what are the stuff that need to be build/loaded into base system for this to work? This way I can save memory, boot speed, security. What do you think of all this? Your comments are greatly appreciated. thanks, v -- network warrior
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