I'm on the horns of a dilemma in considering changes for a system that is now deployed to half-a-dozen VMs running under VMWare at a hosting company. We are considering a move to RackSpace which has, in addition to VMWare, a purely container-based option.

I notice that the several VMs are "barely utilized." I wonder if it would not be better in the long run to use a much-bigger virtual machine(?) ... y'know, "one computer than can do everything under one roof" . Containers seem to be a technology that would work very well if the "one machine" were truly big-enough. But, for political reasons and otherwise, I must ponder very carefully a break from a familiar-sounding model ... a model of my devising, at the time ... that arguably works.

The various web-sites must share files ... truly, "many gigabytes" of them. I know that file-sharing (now using NFSv4) is a potential bottleneck. But I fear deploying to a single container-based arrangement and running into a situation when, in the future, I'd have to have more than one container-host and have to be sharing files again. There are no complicated computational requirements to speak of.

Dedicated hosting (at RackSpace) tops at 64MB/box at what's likely to be a comfortable price-point.

I'd like to hear the experiences of people who have actually moved their "modest web-site ... a few hundred stores" into this sort of environment, particularly if you did standardize on containers. How did you "test the water?"

You can get a dedicated UltraSPARC computer with 2000 processors, Terabytes of RAM and practically unlimited storage and ORACLE database instances hosted by ORACLE/Sun for just $148,000.00 a month... actually they are fairly reasonable for more modest hosting considering it's a Solaris UltraSPARC machine and you get at least one instance of ORACLE database on it. A personal metered account for your own use and development or light web serving is only an estimated $25/month. That's competitive with companies giving you Linux running on Intel running mySQL or something... I have to see what GoDaddy is charging me, I might switch. I'm glad I looked into this...

Anyway, I never really answered your question. Yes, I think partitions are better. Virtual machines are much more likely to interfere with each other, so usually you get less control over them if you're on a large shared system. Now, if you have a dedicated machine, then this probably won't be a problem. But, for example, there are many software package I can't really install on my shared virtual GoDaddy account, I don't have root access, and they tend to delete my work without backing it up. I really don't like them (GoDaddy), for hosting at least, they're OK for DNS.

"Thank you, gentlemen."

Still hoping for relevant responses.

... and still, I am hoping.

I could go one of two ways: create a small number of VMs (quite possibly, "just one"), and outfit them with several containers – roughly replicating the arrangement of VMs that we are running now, or I could chart a completely different course and use OpenStack.

These web sites do not have a large number of users, but they do a large dollar-volume of business. (A single transaction might be worth $75,000 or more.) They must be rock-solid reliable, and, since they carry a large amount of photographic-image content, they must be much speedier than the existing phalanx of VMs are right now.