shemaiah telemaque's picture

Hi 

I was wondering if it is possible to combine lamp, doamin controllerm, zimbre, gallery packages into one virtual appliances. Is so can someone give instructions on how to do so thank you.

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Jeremy Davis's picture

It will require you starting with one of the appliances and then adding/installing the funcionality of the others. There is no tutorial on how to do this, and without doing it myself I can not guide you. You are on your own if you wish to go down that path (although I am more than happy to help where I can). Where this becomes particularly painful is Zimbra; as it is only available as a TKL legacy applliance. The others are all available in the latest v11.x. You could start with the Zimbra appliance and add the others, but that will only give you ~12mths of support left, so you will need to do it all again in the near future. The main reason the devs haven't released an updated Zimbra appliance AFAIK is because Zimbra no longer supports 32bit OS (which TKL currently is - 64bit builds, along with an updated Zimbra should come next release).

So assuming you are planning to use your own hardware, a much. much beter way to go IMO is to install a hypervisor OS (such as ProxmoxVE) to your hardware. Then you can install the various appliances as separate VMs. There are a number of advantages to going this direction. Some of the ones that spring to mind are:

  • Portability - The VMs are easily migrated from VM to hardware, or to alternative hardware hypervisor (using TKLBAM). You could migrate just one, or all of them...
  • Reduced backup size and complexity - Assuming you were to use TKLBAM, backups will be smaller (in total - as only data & config for each specific appliance needs to be stored).
  • Scalability - Resources can be matched to each VM according to it's needs and one app won't be able to  rob resources from another. Ie resources can be formally allocated to each VM.
  • Easily tweak and tune each app - without negative or unintended impact on others.
  • Redundancy - If one app chokes/crashes/breaks etc, it won't drag all the others down too.
  • Upgrade/update path - You can update each appliance indivudally thus spread out your workflow and ensure that each one is working well before going to the next.
  • Opportunity to test other appliances on the same hardware similtaneously (assuming you have left over resources).

Obviously there are some downsides too (many of the above points have inherant counter points) although personally I think the good outweighs the bad. The only one that I think may be a deal breaker were if you are planning on using AWS. Using VMs is not supported on AWS, so were you to migrate your appliances to AWS, then each would need to be independant, thus increasing the cost.

If you go for ProxmoxVE then you can set it up so it can download TKL OVZ templates directly from within the WebUI. Have a look here. Zimbra is the only one that isn't available as an OVZ template (because it's legacy) but you can download the ISO and install from that.

shemaiah telemaque's picture

Thank you I guess I will leave zimbra out for now.

rclilly's picture

I like your idea of running TKL appliances as VMs from a base OS, but Proxmox VE requires a 64-bit processor and 1 GB of RAM. My system is 32 bit w/ only 512 MB RAM. Any suggestions?

Jeremy Davis's picture

So you could install a base 32 bit Debian with OVZ support. Theoretically Proxmox may be an option (on their wiki somewhere is instructions on how to install the PVE packages on 32 bit Debian) but you may be better off building your own OVZ host. Google should help there hopefully.

Or Dominick (DRivard) mentions in passing over on this thread) that he is using a n OVZ only host with a WebUI, it may be worth asking him about it over there?

The limitation with OVZ though is that you will only be able to use Linux, but that's probably not a huge big deal. With only 512MB you won't have a lot of head room anyway.

rclilly's picture

Thanks Jeremy, I'm a complete virtualization newbie, so figuring out my options is a little overwhelming at this point. I plan on only running Linux on the system, so the lack of KVM shouldn't hurt. I plan on running just 2 or 3 TKL appliances simultaneously, and there will never be a heavy load on the system. My basic needs are for the combination of the File Server and the LAMP Stack appliances. There's a chance I might want to run Tracks and/or WordPress on the LAMP stack. I want to run the system headless, so a Web UI for everything is mandatory.

I found the instructions to Install Proxmox VE on Debian Lenny on 32-Bit Processor. I'm wondering whether my base OS should be a bare bones Debian Squeeze (or Lenny?) install, and then add virtualization capabilities to that, or would I be better off starting with the TKL Core appliance, or maybe even Bootstrap JeOS?

I'll read the link you provided above about OpenVZ templates and see what I can learn there, as well as research building an OVZ host.

Again, suggestions appreciated!

Jeremy Davis's picture

Although a bootstrap JeOS would be ok too. Personally I'd go minimal Debian - the netinstall ISO is good in my experience assuming that your internet connection is ok.

Then you could try installing Proxmox, or alternatively you could just install OpenVZ. TBH the more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to suggest just installing the bare bones of what you want - ie Debian Squeeze netinstall with OVZ support (or here) and WebVZ (looks like a good OVZ WebUI but I've never tried it - install instructions here).

Happy to help out more if you need it, but probably better to start a new thread rather than hijack this one (I'll see it, but perhaps link back here so I know where we are up to).

rclilly's picture

I did a minimal installation of Debian with an SSH server being the only package I selected during the install. I then added OpenVZ and WebVZ and got it all configured using the information from the links you provided. I created several virtual machines using the TKL templates (File Server, LAMP, and Tracks) and got them working so-so.

After much fiddling around I've decided that for my needs, on this particular computer, this setup is too complicated. I don't like, or need, the multiple IP addresses (each appliance has its own, plus that of the base OS), etc. What I'm going to try to do now is start with the File Server appliance as my base OS, then add the LAMP stack to that from the repositories. For now I'm only experimenting with Tracks, so I'm running that as a VM on my Windows machine. If I decide I like it I'll add that to my File Server machine as well.

I thought about doing as a straight Debian or Ubuntu install, but I like the default configuration of the File Server, and the integration with the TurnKey Hub.

Thanks for your help! I was surprised I was actually able to get all it working. I'm new to virtualization and haven't touched Linux since Redhat 4.

Mikey's picture

Not sure if you are still looking for suggestions on 32-bit Hypervisors but if you don't mind non-opensource then VMWare's ESX 3.5.x series support 32-bit and they are free download.  You just have to register to get a free activation key.

 

Mike


rclilly's picture

I'll check it out.

Robert

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