The big thing in the server hosting industry right now is virtualisation. One of the buzz words is VPS or Virtual Private Server. It’s a low end offering where a virtual machine is provisioned, quite probably on non-clustered hardware, e.g. if the host dies then every VM hosted on it goes down too. This keeps the hosting costs low and makes the VPS machine very cheap. You could think of VPS as being an enthusiasts solution.
There is a big market for this. If you’re in the web site hosting business you’re familiar with using a Control Panel. This is the system that is the interface for your customers to the hosting system. DotNetPanel have just released their Control Panel for Hyper-V based VPS. This allows VPS hosting companies that are using Hyper-V to sell virtual machines to customers and give the customers a web based interface over the Internet.
This looks like a great solution for selling to enthusiasts. However, I don’t see it as a professional solution. For me a virtual machine should be treated exactly like a physical machine (even if deployment is slightly different, e.g. different methods and quicker). Business machines should not be cut from cookie cutters. They should be on private networks protected by firewalls. Firewalls aren’t one-size-fits-all. Do you need TCP 443 open, TCP 3389, etc? A limitation with this release of Hyper-V is that each VM on a cluster requires it’s own LUN – yes you can put lots of VM’s on a single LUN but that’s not a flexible cluster solution. We’re waiting on Windows 2008 R2 for the cluster file system to make life easier for this sort of thing. So VPS on Hyper-V means no host clustering in reality.
Finally, in this sort of methodology, you cannot sell SPLA (leased by the month) licensing legally. As a SPLA reseller, you must ensure that the correct types of licenses are being used by your customers. For example, we have anonymous and authenticated Per CPU Windows Server licenses. Per CPU licensing is used instead of user CAL’s. Anonymous is fine where you have a dumb web server where Windows does not authenticate the users. Authenticated licensing is required where Windows does authenticate the user, e.g. when a SharePoint site asks a user to log on the log on attempt by the user uses a Windows user account specific to that user. Authenticated per CPU licenses are significantly more expensive than Anonymous. I’ve noticed some hosting companies offer no explanation of this legal requirement and skirt around it to offer their customers the cheapest license available, despite it being illegal. VPS sales automation places the responsibility on the customer who will not understand this so they’ll always go for the cheap option.
And don’t even get me started on people selling Windows Standard/Enterprise Anonymous licenses which are no longer available from Microsoft. A: It’s wrong for these hosting companies to do this. B: It was wrong of MS to pull these SKU’s from the list of SPLA licenses.