Hi Friends,

We are a multi tenant hosting provider and use Apache on RHEL 5 servers. As the environment is shared, as of now, we didn't provide users access to directly change their site vhosts. But now we wish to make the process flexible and were thinking of having multiple Apache instances for each of the sites on the server. This will ensure that each site user will have access to change vhosts, restart apache etc for his her respective instance.
Can you please suggest if having multiple Apache instances on a single RHEL 5 server was possible?

thanks and regards,
Kaushik

It is possible to run multiple apache instances with different ports. But it may not what you want for multi-tenant setup. You may start think of container based virtualization.

Hi Myatthu,

Many thanks for your reply and suggestions.

May you please elaborate on "container based virtualization"?
We basically want the users to have access to their site's respective vhosts and are able to safely restart Apache to reflect new config changes i.e. without affecting other sites on the server.

Currently(in our old system) we have a virtual RHEL server with single Apache instance and multiple virtualhosts with varying IP-Port combinations.

Thanks and Regards,
Kaushik

I am recommending to create separate vm for your different customer.
if your user based is not much, it should be fine. But definitely you need more system resource for each customer.
you can look at openvz for container.
www.openvz.org
Good Luck

Hi Myatthu,

Thanks again for your reply. This kernel virtualization offered by OpenVZ is new to me. I will explore this further.
Is it the most effective way how multi tenant hosting providers allocate independent shells to users?

Thanks and Regards,
Kaushik

You should take a look on this project. It will be more relevant for your requirement.
http://www.webmin.com/virtualmin.html
Cheer