Let’s see. We have already added two new images to City Cloud, a L.A.M.P. server and a Windows Server 2008 alongside MS SQL. We have decided to go for a suggestion a user gave us on Twitter (@sandelius).

So, we have created a Ruby image that comes with all the bells and whistles and packed with Nginx, a fast performing web-server.

Here are the details.

Ruby is all around

Speaking strictly of the server side of things, most of the languages used for web development are PHP, ASP.NET, Java and Python. Ruby is a relatively newcomer language and although it appeared at around the same time as PHP, it didn’t take off until a few years ago.

Thanks to its simplicity you can get started easily and thanks to its influences, you get a robust language that can be used for a variety of purposes. Last but not least, at around 2005 Ruby on Rails appeared which is a popular framework to create websites or web applications and coupled with its excellent package management (packages are called “gems” in Ruby), you get full extensibility.

Performance is key

Nginx is a web server and a proxy server. Thanks to its robustness and speed, Its usage has been steadily growing in recent years. It was created by Igor Sysoev.

This is a great choice since it can serve thousands of connections on modest hardware. It’s a fast and proven piece of software, and best of all, it’s open-source which gives anyone the opportunity to peruse the code and even contribute back to it.

Since we are using Ruby, we tossed in the excellent Phusion Passenger also known as mod_rails. Which is great for deploying Rails applications for the web.

Image details

The image is based off Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.2.1 64-bit which is quite stable and up-to-date. We have also installed RVM, which stands for Ruby Version Manager and is great to handle different ruby versions at once. This is quite handy in a production environment since we wouldn’t want anything to break if we update Ruby and something changed (ideally, this is of course, taken care of in a development/testing environment).

There is also Ruby on Rails, a well-known framework that takes full advantage of the MVC model and gives you a lot of productivity tools. But let’s not get dwindled down in details, here is a TL; DR list with all the versions:

• RVM, version: 1.10.
• Ruby, version: 1.9.3
• Nginx (with passenger built-in, installed on /opt/nginx), version: 1.0.10
• Rails, version: 3.2.1
• Debian GNU/Linux: 6.0.2.1 64-bit

We have created a test app that you can quickly use to see if everything is working. Just put the following line on your hosts file (usually /etc/hosts on Linux or \Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\hosts on Windows), replace it with your corresponding IP address and then line up your browser to rackexample.com. A simple “Hello World!” html should appear.

your_ip_address rackexample.com

Final comments

Last but not least, let us thank @sandelius for the suggestion and we hope you can all put this image to good use. It definitely saves a lot of time that can be better spent developing or deploying applications.

As usual, since this is a new image, if you find anything odd or that can be improved, we’d love your comments.

Great, so you just created your Linux server on City Cloud. You have chosen to use our LAMP image or you just went and installed Apache, PHP and MySQL yourself.

So far so good, but this is just the beginning. To be able to make your website serve as many requests as possible, it’s important to make a few basic adjustments to the default installation of Apache and MySQL.

Elusive target

When we talk about web performance at a grand scale, we usually mean having a fast response to web requests, making your website load as fast as possible.

Now, that’s easier said than done, but mostly because there are many angles of attack when we talk about the speed in which a page loads. For instance, sometimes, the server is a beast of a machine but the software is not well configured for the occasion.

Sometimes the server and software are just fine but you have a few tables in your database that need indexing. Or your PHP script could use a little more optimization. So we find ourselves having multiple scenarios that call for different solutions.

There are entire books written on this subject but as a rule of thumb, performance improvements are an ongoing process where iteration, testing and measurements are the key to a fast website.

Let’s get to it

Here we present you with some practical tweaks to make your basic installation handle a little bit more. And although there are a lot more parameters than those exposed here, this is a great starting point.

Apache2:

- Unused modules:

Apache processes are memory hogs, it’s common to see them using over a hundred megabytes of ram. Picture a server of 1 GB of ram, 5 people browsing the site and you can see how things could quickly turn for the worse. Disabling unused modules ensures that every process started uses only what it needs.

To disable a module on Apache 2 you just do the following:

a2dismod module_name

And then make sure you restart Apache

apachectl restart

- Keepalive (persistent connections):

This option tells Apache to keep a connection for a given client so it doesn’t have to spawn a new process all the time, which has a considerable overhead when we are talking about multiple connections from several clients. It’s a good idea to enable this option (set it to On) but only if we get the KeepAliveTimeOut parameter down, since a big number could clog up the server with unnecessary processes.

Since a web page usually does not take more than 3 seconds (unless there is something wrong), this parameter should be in the 3-5 range.

Also, if we know our website has a lot of page loads (for instance, because it’s a web application), it’s also a good idea to have a big number of MaxKeepAliveRequests.

- Timeout:

Lowering the general timeout to something more reasonable always make sure no Apache processes are lying around for too long. Be careful not to lower it too much though. A value of 10-15 is a good starting value.

- Name server resolution:

Apache logs are a powerful feature that can later be used for a variety of purposes, from security auditing to traffic processing. It’s much more readable to humans to have a hostname than a IP address and while one hit to a name server might not be that much, a site with a lot of traffic adds up in requests.

If you don’t need this at all, it’s better to have it Off.

- .htaccess file lookup

If you have a virtual host that’s not using .htaccess files, set AllowOverride parameter to None so Apache doesn’t look check each directory for .htaccess.

- Amount of processes:

This is mostly dependent on the memory available and cores. The basic settings won’t give you much simultaneous connections but it’s a good idea to play with them until you find the right balance.

One thing is for certain, do not let that memory ran out since it will swap to disk and that’s going to slow down the server considerably. And if you have disabled the swap memory, the kernel will start to kill the processes (if we are lucky) or grind the server to a halt.

Also, it’s key to understand how many visits our site will have, at least a ball park figure. With that in mind, we can anticipate and set the numbers accordingly. Fortunately, thanks to City Cloud, it’s easy to scale up when needed.

To give you a point of reference, for a server with 2 cores and 1 GB of RAM, this could be useful (assuming the multi-process version of Apache2):

StartServers         10
MinSpareServers      10
MaxSpareServers      15
ServerLimit     50
MaxClients         50
MaxRequestsPerChild   500

These parameters are optimistic. They assume you won’t have more than 50 clients connected at the same time. Of course, this is usually tailored to one’s needs. To give you an idea, 50 simultaneous user at a peak may represent a site with 2000-3000 daily visits. Which is a small site but nothing to scoff at.

MySQL:

- Caching:

This is one of the greatest optimizations for sites that have a lot of traffic and generally read from the database. Caching means that common queries are retrieved from the cache, which is orders of magnitude faster than doing the full query.

Caching takes a toll on memory, so care must be taken that enough memory is available to our MySQL server process. Of particular interest we have the following parameters, given a server with 1 GB of RAM as reference:

query_cache_type = 1

query_cache_size = 32M

key_buffer_size = 64M

thread_cache_size =  4

max_connections =  150

- Separate the database:

This is not a setting but a common practice. If you start with a small server, chances are you have the web and database server in the same machine. Once traffic starts to get higher, things tends to get messy since Apache and MySQL are fighting for resources.

Fortunately, the process of moving a database out of the main server is not a complicated one (and a great idea for an upcoming blog post!). Of course, if you happen to have a site that grows constantly, you will possibly enter the realm of replication, automatic failover and other techniques that are used when you have a database spanning multiple servers.

- No substitute for a well designed database

Last but not least, if your database has a non-optimal structure, it doesn’t matter how much you scale, you will always have bottlenecks that have nothing to do with your server settings. Making sure your database has a good structure is just as important as having the right infrastructure.

Conclusion

Remember that this is just one way to optimize (and a subset of tweaks). You also have other options, such as choosing another webserver (nginx for instance), scaling vertically or horizontally, optimizing your database and code.

Also, what we’ve exposed here lies around basic optimization and it’s definitely not the ideal case (where, as we’ve mentioned, the database has its own hardware, etc) but it will get you by while you concentrate on your site.

For now, this is a great way to start pumping more requests per second. Soon enough we’ll publish articles on other ways to get more juice out of virtual servers. This is just the beginning on an exciting journey towards greater efficiency.

We have had Windows 2008 Server images on City Cloud for a while now. We also have Windows 2008 and MS-SQL Server integrated but recently we implemented VirtIO drivers for Windows 2008R2 and according to our tests, the speed improvement is considerable.

So now, in order to save you quite a bit of time and offer you something with good performance, we´ve packaged Windows alongside MS-SQL and VirtIO drivers all-in-one.

Read on to find out the details about it.

Windows Server 2008 and MS-SQL Std ready to go

You can already find this new image on the App Center. Click on “New VM” or the plus sign on the App Center listing, name your new server and after a few minutes, it will be ready.

Installing Windows Server 2008 and MS-SQL can be a time consuming task, you need to check for pre-requisites, go through the installation process and then restart and wait for several updates to be applied.

So, this VM makes a lot of sense since it will save you precious time. And since the installation is a base one, with the default options, you can go in and change the configuration at your heart´s content.

Blazing drivers

As we have exposed recently, our tests showed great promise when using a Windows 2008 instance with VirtIO drivers installed. Since MS-SQL is a robust but power hungry application, you need all the efficiency you can get from the virtualization platform.

Thanks to this image, you don´t have to worry at all to install them. We have done that for you already.

Useful tips

The first time you start the virtual machine, it might take a while to get the public IP address on the details box. In that case, we recommend that you use the built-in VNC client, login, change your password and obtain the IP address.

From them on, you can use Remote Desktop which is a much better option to operate a remote Windows Server setup. You have important details about the credentials on the Virtual Machine description, be sure to check that out.

Last but not least, bear in mind that on this setup, your cost will include the Windows Server 2008R2 license and the MS-SQL 2008 Standard Edition license as well. But not to worry, our prices are really competitive and just as important, paid per hour.

We hope you enjoy this new image and as usual, leave as a comment or two if you have some feedback or preferences for future ones.

Since City Cloud got out of beta, a couple of years ago, we have been steadily adding images and upgrading when necessary. We have added quite a few options in terms of operating systems, we currently have Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Gentoo, Fedora Core, Red Hat Enterprise, FreeBSD and Windows 2008 server.

Images allow you to setup a new VM and have an operating system up and running in a matter of minutes. This saves you a lot of hassle. Now, we are going to go a step further and add something extra.

Read on to find out more.

Again and again

When installing a web server, a database server or an application, the process usually ends up being the same. Install the operating system, setup configuration options, change the defaults to make the server more secure and finally install the applications. For instance, installing something like Apache on different servers is a fairly similar process, which varies only when setting up a specific site (that might require a different module than the default, or a different configuration on the virtual host file, etc).

With the advent of mainstream Cloud Computing, there are a few companies that offer servers that come pre-packaged with standard software. We do that here with the 1-click installers on our shared web hosting environment but now we are going a step further and offer you something like that, only this time, for City Cloud.

Our first image: L.AM.P.

Our idea is to constantly give you new images. On this occasion we are starting with a pretty popular one: L.A.M.P.

For those of you who still are not aware, L.A.M.P. is an acronym for a popular platform comprised of a variant of Linux, Apache web server, MySQL database server and the PHP scripting language.

This setup basically allows you to upload a site (via SCP which is already enabled), create a virtual host, setup the database and off you go.

Instructions and details

Let’s get down to the specifics. The software installed, is the following:

• Ubuntu GNU/Linux 11.10 64-bit Server (Oneiric Ocelot)
• Apache 2 (MPM prefork) version: 2.2.20
• PHP version 5.3.6-13
• MySQL server version 5.1

We have also taken the liberty to create a dummy user and a virtual host, along with a small php script that you can use to check that everything is working fine. And of course, you could base your first site off of that or delete it altogether.

The user is called “webuser” and the virtual host is called “dummy-site”. Please refer to the Apache documentation on how to manage virtual hosts.

You can easily test that everything is working by pointing your IP address (check the server details on the City Cloud control panel) to the host “dummy-site”. Which basically means adding the following line to your Windows or Linux hosts file:

public_ip_address dummy-site

After that, just point your browser to http://dummy-site and if everything went well, you should see the output of the phpinfo() function which displays a comprehensive list of options available to PHP.

For your information, the credentials for the users are on the description of the VM, this includes the administrator user, the regular user and the MySQL root password. Bear in mind that the system has been setup so you have to change them at your first login (the same process implemented for the other images).

From here on, it´s up to you to continue setting up your website.

Just the beginning

Our idea is to upload one new image per week, for a least several weeks. We are aiming for those applications that are the most used ones but if you have a suggestion for a pre-packaged one, feel free to leave a comment and we´ll take it into consideration.

Last but not least, we have labeled this image as Beta so feel free to test it and report back to us if you find anything odd. Be advised that you will be still charged for the usage of the VM so use it with care, although thanks to our flexible hourly rate platform, you can easily test this in less than an hour and then delete it or continue using it.

Background

This week about 1000 servers were affected by an issue in one of our storage nodes. This issue is not related to our issue last year in our Gluster environment. Some of the servers were simply affected by limited performance and some were down for as much as a few hours.

The storage node in question is a straight up a redundant NFS/ZFS solution where we in some cases have used a form of deduplication for better efficiency in actual storage usage. We noticed a performance degradation already on Tuesday which then yesterday (Thursday) culminated in an even greater performance degradation where ultimately many VMs did not get enough I/O performance to stay alive. The deduplication system uses a lot of memory and if there is not enough it will start using disk which simply is not speedy enough to supply the need for City Cloud. This occurance slowed the general disk performance and in turn either slowed machines or took them down.

What will happen going forward

We have had extreme stability in these types of storage nodes in the last 5 years. They offer good value in performance as well and allows us to offer good price/quality to all our customers. we will make sure we remove any type of deduplication that we have used as we do not risk this scenario going forward. To do so we will move a lot of servers off of the storage node in question to a new node which is similar in setup but newer and configured with no deduplication.

We expect this work to happen during February and when a VM is moved it could mean 10-15 minutes of down time. Any such maintenance will of course be scheduled during night time and will be kept to a minimum.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We will work very hard for it not to happen again.

Thank you for being a customers of our City Cloud service.

Recently we just released a guide to install Debian GNU/Linux from scratch. You can check that guide out, right here.

Since Ubuntu is based off Debian, this guide might have some similarities but it’s useful for those of you who have never used Debian before and want to try Ubuntu directly.

Without further ado, here you have a step-by-step guide on how to install Ubuntu 11.10 Server 64-bit, otherwise known as “Oneiric Ocelot”.

Getting Started

First thing you need to do is login into the control panel. We are assuming you already have an account with us, if you don’t, it’s very easy to do.

Once inside, pick the VM tab and select New VM. The following window will appear (click on any image in this tutorial to see an enlarged version). Skip to the next section if you already have a working knowledge of how to setup new servers on City Cloud.

As you can see, this popup is similar to the one you get when choosing one template from the App Center. The main differences are that you have to select an ISO image, which basically points to the installer you want to install (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora Core, Gentoo, Windows Server 2008, FreeBSD, etc), and that you can select a disk other than the default (usually 20GB or 50GB). You also may select which advanced options you want to run on this virtual machine. Do not worry about the Hardware Template since that option is easily modified later on.  So, go ahead and name your server and complete the options and click on Create.

What follows is the usual provisioning process. You have to wait until the platform has located your resources, which varies from a couple to several minutes depending mostly on the size of your disk. Once the server is ready, it appears on the VM tab so just click on the details icon (last one on the right of the corresponding server row). This is what you get.

As you can see, there is no IP address detected since we don´t have an operating system yet. The only option available to do this is through VNC. Fortunately, our platform has an integrated VNC client, although you can use an external one of your choosing (i.e.: TightVNC viewer). To get in you need the corresponding credentials, which are located on the Remote Console tab, as follows.

Click on the icon on the bottom right (just about the Save button). This is a quick shortcut to the integrated VNC applet, which only asks you for the password. Use the one provided and we are off to a good start. Please note that you need the latest Java version installed on your computer, for this to work. In case you are using your own VNC client, you will need to specify the IP address, the port and the password.

Setting up

Here we are, the server just started with the Ubuntu GNU/Linux first screen.

Immediately you can select your language and region. For your information, our datacenter is located on Sweden but you can select the one  you prefer. Also, don´t worry about this too much since it can always be changed later.

Next, you will be prompted to setup the domain name. If unsure, just delete what´s there and leave it blank. Later on, when you have setup a proper domain name using our DNS servers (or yours), you will be able to configure it properly. For now, it doesn’t´t really matter since all Virtual Machines will automatically get a public IP address that can be used to access the server.

Here we select the time zone which is also detected automatically for you.

Here comes the disk setup.

Now, this is one of those things that´s great about Cloud Computing, since the platform is already setup to handle the storage layer, we don´t have to worry about drivers or locating the disks. We just selected the size and how many disks at the beginning, and that´s about it. Here you have four options, three guided one and a Manual one for advanced users. We usually go for the first one.

After that, you are presented with a disk selection. If you have one, the answer is obvious (also, did we mention that you can add many disks afterwards? Well, you can!). Just pick the disk you would like to install the operating system. After that you get a confirmation to write the changes to disk, say “Yes”.

You are now prompted to setup a regular user. Just fill in the username and pick a password, make sure it´s a strong one and has a combination of letters, numbers, uppercase letters and special characters.

A nice option from the Ubuntu installation is that you can setup home directory encryption from the get go. This is useful to keep your files unreadable by other users, even if your hardware has been stolen. On the other hand, it might come with a small performance penalty. If unsure, answer “No”.

Installing the base system

Great, we already have made all the basic adjustments. Now we get to the part where we actually install the system.

Automatic updates configuration. The choice is up to you, you can manually install updates, automatically install or use Landscape. In a production environment, you’ll probably want to use the manual option since updating a live system it’s better done under supervision.

In this subsequent screen, you get to pick the default packages that will be installed. Make sure you have OpenSSH server checked so we can continue using SSH immediately after the installation finishes, which is much faster than using VNC (and inherently more secure). Tip: You can use the spacebar on your keyboard to select/deselect packages. Since the network is setup automatically with DHCP, which in turns gets you a public IP address, your packages will be downloaded and installed right away. This process should not take more than a few minutes, remember, we are on a fast network over here!.

Next, we need to tell the installer where the boot loader (a small program that loads up at boot time and select which operating system to boot) is going to be located. You could select a partition but it´s generally safe to install it on the master boot record so just say Yes to the question (unless you specifically need to put it somewhere else).

At this point, if everything went as expected, we should arrive at this final screen that tells you the installation is complete and that you should make sure to remove the CD-ROM. Don´t worry about that, the system will automatically boot from the hard disk. Just select continue and we are done.

Post installation and conclusion

That basically sums it up, the boot up process should take no more than a few seconds and will lead you to the following screen. Bear in mind that we didn’t setup the root password since the regular user is already on the initial sudoers list, which means that you get administrator access by issuing commands with ‘sudo command’.

We are now ready to start using our new server with Ubuntu GNU/Linux installed. On this case we used Ubuntu 11.10 64-bit but the process is pretty similar to other versions.

From now on, you can check the VM tab, select your server details and write down the public IP address we´ve assigned for you. You can also start using a SSH client (i.e.: Putty) and the credentials you just typed during the installation process.

Remember that VNC is always available (unless manually disabled by you) if you need to check the server in the future and you cannot, for some reason, enter via SSH.

What you do from this point onwards is start setting up any packages or configuration your project, website or application requires. We recommend you to fiddle with the system as much as possible, given the flexibility our Cloud Computing platform provides.

Last but not least, this process is usually done on certain occasions but you don’t need to do it every time, you can always clone another VM and start from there.

Setting up a new virtual machine on City Cloud is fairly easy. Once you have your account, you just go to the App Center on our control panel and select the operating system you’d like to install. We have many flavors of Windows, Linux and even FreeBSD.

These server templates give you the base install with everything ready to go in a matter of minutes. This is very snappy and convenient, but sometimes you want to install the operating system from scratch. Usually because you want more flexibility, you need to setup an advanced option or you would like to use an ISO image that’s not yet available on the App Center.

On this tutorial, we give you a step by step guide of how to do just that.

Getting Started

First thing you need to do is login into the control panel. We are assuming you already have an account with us, if you don’t, it’s very easy to do.

Once inside, pick the VM tab and select New VM. The following window will appear (click on any image in this tutorial to see an enlarged version). Skip to the next section if you already have a working knowledge of how to setup new servers on City Cloud.

As you can see, this popup is similar to the one you get when choosing one template from the App Center. The main differences are that you have to select an ISO image, which basically points to the installer you want to install (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora Core, Gentoo, Windows Server 2008, FreeBSD, etc), and that you can select a disk other than the default (usually 20GB or 50GB). You also may select which advanced options you want to run on this virtual machine. Do not worry about the Hardware Template since that option is easily modified later on.  So, go ahead and name your server and complete the options and click on Create.

What follows is the usual provisioning process. You have to wait until the platform has located your resources, which varies from a couple to several minutes depending mostly on the size of your disk. Once the server is ready, it appears on the VM tab so just click on the details icon (last one on the right of the corresponding server row). This is what you get.

As you can see, there is no IP address detected since we don´t have an operating system yet. The only option available to do this is through VNC. Fortunately, our platform has an integrated VNC client, although you can use an external one of your choosing (i.e.: TightVNC viewer). To get in you need the corresponding credentials, which are located on the Remote Console tab, as follows.

Click on the icon on the bottom right (just about the Save button). This is a quick shortcut to the integrated VNC applet, which only asks you for the password. Use the one provided and we are off to a good start. Please note that you need the latest Java version installed on your computer, for this to work. In case you are using your own VNC client, you will need to specify the IP address, the port and the password.

Setting up

Here we are, the server just started with the Debian GNU/Linux installer welcome.

We recommend the basic install, since it´s the fastest one. On the next screens we need to pick our country or region. This is usually used for deciding the time zone and the locale. For your information, our datacenter is located on Sweden but you can select anyone you prefer, since the language and keyboard are selected separately. Also, don´t worry about this too much since it can always be changed later.

After the region and language selection, we get to setup the hostname. Choose any single word of your choosing.

Next, you will be prompted to setup the domain name. If unsure, just delete what´s there and leave it blank. Later on, when you have setup a proper domain name using our DNS servers (or yours), you will be able to configure it properly. For now, it doesn’t´t really matter since all Virtual Machines will automatically get a public IP address that can be used to access the server.

Next screen is the root password selection.

Make sure to type a strong password since this is the one account that can really mess up your system if used by the wrong hands. A strong password usually contains a combination of letters and numbers, uppercase letters and special characters.

After that, you need to setup a regular user. Just fill in the username and pick a password, make sure it´s different from the root one. Here comes the disk setup.

Now, this is one of those things that´s great about Cloud Computing, since the platform is already setup to handle the storage layer, we don´t have to worry about drivers or locating the disks. We just selected the size and how many at the beginning, and that´s about it. Here you have four options, three guided one and a Manual one for advanced users. We usually go for the first one.

After that, you are presented with a disk selection. If you have one, the answer is obvious (also, did we mention that you can add many disks afterwards? Well, you can!). Just pick the disk you would like to install the operating system. The following option has to do on how to partition the disk. You can select All files in one partition but we usually recommend using the “Separate /home partition” option since it´s a lot more easier to move the user homes partition to another disk if they grow in size.

Installing the base system

Great, we already have made all the basic adjustments. Now we get to the part where we actually install the system.

Just say no to CD/DVD selection and say Yes to the “Use a network mirror?” question, since we are going to install through the network, this option is much nicer since it gives us the latest packages.

As we mentioned, the datacenter and the servers are located on Sweden, so it only makes sense to choose a Swedish mirror. This will guarantee, alongside our redundant ISPs connected to the datacenter, great speed when downloading the packages.

In the subsequent screen, you get to pick the default packages that will be installed. Unless you are absolutely sure you need a Graphical environment, just deselect it. Also, make sure you have SSH server checked so we can continue using SSH immediately after the installation finishes, which is much faster than using VNC (and inherently more secure). Tip: You can use the spacebar on your keyboard to select/deselect packages.

Since the network is setup automatically with DHCP, which in turns gets you a public IP address, your packages will be downloaded and installed right away. This process should not take more than a few minutes, remember, we are on a fast network over here!.

Next, we need to tell the installer where the boot loader (a small program that loads up at boot time and select which operating system to boot) is going to be located. You could select a partition but it´s generally safe to install it on the master boot record so just say Yes to the question (unless you specifically need to put it somewhere else).

At this point, if everything went as expected, we should arrive at this final screen that tells you the installation is complete and that you should make sure to remove the CD-ROM. Don´t worry about that, the system will automatically boot from the hard disk. Just select continue and we are done.

Post installation and conclusion

That basically sums it up, the boot up process should take no more than a few seconds and will lead you to the following screen.

We are now ready to start using our new server with Debian GNU/Linux installed. On this case we used Debian 6.0 64-bit but the process is pretty similar to other versions.

From now on, you can check the VM tab, select your server details and write down the public IP address we´ve assigned for you. You can also start using a SSH client (i.e.: Putty) and the credentials you just typed during the installation process.

Remember that VNC is always available (unless manually disabled by you) if you need to check the server in the future and you cannot, for some reason, enter via SSH.

What you do from this point onwards is start setting up any packages or configuration your project, website or application requires. We recommend you to fiddle with the system as much as possible, given the flexibility our Cloud Computing platform provides.

Last but not least, this process is usually done on certain ocassions but you don’t need to do it every time, you can always clone another VM and start from there.

So far, our Linux based operating systems in City Cloud have had a slight advantage when it comes to performance. These operating systems have access to a special driver which makes them more integrated in the virtualisation platform which in turn gives them an edge performance vise. We recently insalled the same drivers for Windows so that our customers can get great performance regardless of which OS they choose.

What is VirtIO/BLK?

VirtIO and VirtBLK is in short, the closest you get to doing full virtualization. Usually an operating system is running ON the virtualisation platform, this is the case with all our Windows based operating systems today. The OS doesn´t know wether it´s running on physical hardware or on a virtualised platform and the communication between the actual computing power (CPU, RAM) and the software is emulated in the virtualisation platform to resemble a physical environment.

Why use VirtIO/BLK?

With VirtIO/VirtBLK you could say that the OS is aware of the fact that it´s running on a virtual environment and co-operates with the hypervisor. The hypervisor is the same as a management system (KVM) that keeps track and allocates resources for all the virtual instances. This way. the OS becomes more integrated with the platform and you no longer need to emulate the communication between the platform and the OS. Naturally, this increases communication speed and in turn performance.

Our tests

We have done some performance testing and compared two Windows servers, one with VirtIO/BLK and one without. The server using VirtIO/BLK gave us a 50% increase in speed within Europe with approximately the same ping. The same goes for read/write speed, 50% faster.

Available for Windows

VirtIO/BLK is now awailable for Windows. We have uploaded a new Windows 2008 Datacenter image with VirtIO/BLK in our app center. Pleasae feel free to try it out. We would like to inform all our users that this image is still in Beta. We might need to do some adjustments and maintenance to make sure that everything works as intended.

Try it out for your self, the increase in speed is apparent and we are so glad to launch this advantage for Windows users. We will post more articles about VirtIO/BLK and Windows in the near future.

Earlier this year, City Cloud was awarded best cloud service at EuroCloud Sweden awards. Now it´s time for the European awards.

On the 12th of December we will go to Paris and meet up with other members of EuroCloud. We will mingle, dine and learn more about the other companies and the people behind them. Last but not least, the European winners will be presented.

Background

During the first half of this year, every Euro Cloud country had an award program. The main purpose of these programs were to promote innovation, promote the best services and show how and why cloud services are good and effective in so many ways. City Cloud was awarded Best Swedis Cloud Service and our partner Severalnines was awarded Best Swedish Startup.

The nominees

The local award programs were conducted in 12 EuroCloud countries where winners in the the 4 categories; Best cloud service, best startup, best business case private sector and best business case public sector were awarded. A number of the winners, including ourselves, also chose to compete in the European award program. Here are the nominees.

The award ceremony in Paris

The ceremony takes place on Monday 12 of December 12 at 19:00 in Paris. We will be onboard a boat on the river Seine during the whole evening.

Keep your fingers crossed and wish us good luck!

A lot of people have asked us how easy or fast it’s to have a basic blog, like WordPress, running on City Network. The answer was simple enough, go ahead and register on our Order page and then do a 1-click install on our control panel.

But then, some people asked us how fast would that be from scratch, using a City Cloud dedicated virtual server. My answer was quick and painless, “well, minutes of course!” but then I started thinking, how many minutes exactly?

So we took a chronometer and got our hands dirty. Here are the results.

Requisites

If you are going through the dedicated servers route, even virtual ones, you probably know how to do this already. If not, we recommend using the shared hosting plan which is more direct and pretty much solves a lot of the hassle for you.

But if you need absolute control, these are the minimum requisites:

• Basic understanding of Linux: installation and operation (generally through a remote connection). Understanding of apt package management system.
• A basic understanding of WordPress and blogs in general.
• Basic knowledge of Cloud Computing and City Cloud, although our admin panel makes it really easy to operate dedicated servers, and even so, we also have guides!

Equipped with that knowledge, we are ready to begin.

Minute 1-10

If you already have an account with us, you can skip this step (you just saved 10 minutes of your time). If not, well, it’s really easy.

Just go to City Cloud home page and click on Create Account.

Afterwards, check your email and follow the link there. Next step is simply verifying your identity, which involves calling us or using your credit card. Don’t worry, we don’t apply any charges to it.

Minute 11-20

By now you should have the corresponding credentials to enter the City Cloud admin panel.

Go ahead and create a basic server. Let’s just use a Small template with defaults parameters since we don’t need any more than that for the basic installation.

This could take a couple of minutes, while the system provisions your server. Once it’s ready, it will appear on the “Running VMs” section.

Minute 21-60

Click on details of the running VM (the “i” icon) and copy the IP address and default credentials located on the Notes box. Using your favorite SSH client (we use putty) just enter the server and, only for the first time, the operating system will ask you for a password. Pick a secure one, with upper case letters and numbers mixed in.

We have decided to use Debian GNU/Linux (at the time of writing, “Squeeze” version), so our instructions are focused on that. The process is slightly different if you choose another distribution, but conceptually the steps are the same.

Once inside we are ready to install the web server, in this case we chose Apache 2 but you can use the one you prefer (although additional configuration might be required for WordPress).

Before we continue, let’s switch to root and make sure you have a debian mirror setup on your sources.list file. On our case, we use a Swedish mirror since the datacenter is located in Sweden and it helps downloading the packages real fast.

Then, we make sure we have the latest apt package list. We also install some handy utilities.

Great, now let’s install the web server. We are going to use Apache 2 (prefork module) and PHP 5.

We have now the web server installed with the default configuration. This also installs PHP as an Apache module. Now, let’s go for the database server: we are using MySQL on this occasion since it’s a widely proven one and because WordPress uses it, of course.

This should install the latest stable version of MySQL (at the moment, 5.1). Once the installation finishes, the system will ask us for a MySQL root user password. Enter a secure one, repeat and proceed. With the database server installed, let’s create a database for our blog and assign a user to it, with the following:

Now, we must install the WordPress blog.

This step also takes care of installing some dependencies such as php5-mysql, php5-gd and others. Now, let’s continue with the configuration. We already have the web server, database server and blog installed. We need to create a virtual host for our blog.

Which should have the following text (you can use vim or nano text editors).

Once saved, we need to create a symbolic link for the WordPress files (they are located on /usr/share/wordpress on debian). And then enable our new virtual site on Apache. Usually your ip address could be replaced by an asterisk (*), please refer to the Apache 2 documentation on named hosts for further information.

We are almost there, on Debian the default WordPress config file is stored on /etc/wordpress, so one convenient way to setting it up is to copy the default file to a new one using our domain name. And then, we open the new config file with a text editor.

Inside, we must setup the following variables with the corresponding information (according to the database name you just created, user and pass).

• define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’);
• define(‘DB_USER’, ‘wordpress_user’);
• define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘put_your_password_here’);
• define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);

At this point, we should be ready to point our browser to the domain or IP address in question. If everything went well, we should see the WordPress Installation page. There are just a few fields to complete, such as the administrator password and email. Once we have filled the form, we are presented with the opportunity to enter the admin page.

Ready to go!

To verify everything, just point your browser to the IP address or domain of the blog. It should give you the default WordPress page. Congratulations!, you have your very own running server with WordPress installed.

Later, what you  usually do is start fiddling with the servers parameters and WordPress configuration. You can also turn off the virtual server, increase the capacity and turn it back on in a minute. This was just a small demonstration of how simple the process is. And it’s generally the same process for various software solutions, not just blogs.

With all the available options and flexibility, the choice from here on, is up to you.