Do you run your own DNS server? If so, we've just added the ability for you to set us up as slaves for all of your domains. Offered at no charge, the new feature under our Tools menu gives you an easy way to add three additional DNS servers to your domains.

Managing forward dns through our vClient isn't for everyone. If you prefer to "roll your own" you'll appreciate this added redundancy.

As always, we welcome your comments and feedback on this new feature. Look for more in the coming weeks as we begin to pick up the pace of our releases.

We've just released a new version of vClient. This comes with quite a few upgrades and enhancements, although as usual not all will be immediately visible to you directly.

One of the largest (and more requested) features is the inclusion of forward/dns zone management. Courtesy of our pre-existing www.zoneconfig.com tool, our zone management allows you to manage an unlimited number of domains/records.

Updates of zones and zone records are instant. To get started, select Tools > DNS Zones and add your domain. Once you've completed adding the appropriate records, change the dns servers at your registrar for your domain to ns1.hostvirtual.com and ns2.hostvirtual.com. You will be able to instantly control and adjust your domains records.

We've got quite a bit more currently in beta but decided to launch this feature after several weeks of baking. As always your feedback is invaluable and we appreciate your comments/features suggestions.

Thanks!
The Host Virtual Team

We've released a new version of our vClient portal. The release brings the UI in-line with our new site and streamlines the management interface.

Most of the enhancements aren't immediately visible as they are foundational pieces on the backend. We're excited about the new functionality and how we will be able to grow the platform from here.

We're happy to announce that effective immediately the amount of bandwidth for each of our plans has increased at no charge.

The new transfer rates are:

XV1: 500gb
XV2: 1000gb
XV3: 2000gb

Enjoy!

Use coupon code NOSETUP when purchasing one of our Virtual Servers and pay no setup fee!

We updated our Gentoo Linux base image today. The new image (still based on the current 2007.0) includes iptables and kernel sources by default as well as updated portage.

A few other minor changes ( USE="nptlonly" in make.conf) etc. are also corrected in this update.

As always, you can sync portage from our local portage tree and use our local distfiles mirror for Gentoo.

Our CentOS image was upgraded to 5.1 final along with a few other changes.

As always, if you're already running a CentOS image you can perform a yum update to upgrade to the latest version.

At 8pm pacific standard time, we will be performing an IOS upgrade on several border routers. Routes will be withdrawn before the change. You may notice a brief interruption as routes reconverge however impact should be minimal.

Please open a support ticket if you notice any unusual behavior. The change is estimated to take 5 minutes.

We’re pleased to announce our second vClient release this month. This update continues to close on our feature outline and builds on the October .1 release.

New features available include:

Additional IP addresses. Purchase additional IP addresses directly from within vClient, without having to go to our billing system. Purchased IP addresses are also automatically aliased to your server. This allows you to add additional addresses within a few seconds without manual configuration. IP addresses are billed at $2/mo, per address.

Reset root password. This feature allows you to reset your systems root password via Tools > Change root password. Consider this a shortcut to updating your password without having to go into rescue mode.

Re-apply network settings. You can now reconfigure your servers network settings via the tools menu at any time. Useful if you've purchased additional address space but decide to provision it later.

We’re excited about these changes. Look for more soon on our upcoming November release. Please continue to send us your feedback on features and functionality you’d like to see.

Regards
The VR Team

We're going to start sharing a breakdown of O/S usage for our service. Here are the numbers from October. The top three O/S are:

1. Gentoo (46%)
2. Ubuntu (39%)
3. Fedora (11%)

We'll continue to share this trend with you every month.

We've added an image for Fedora Core 7 that is available immediately for installation. Subsequently, we will no longer allow you to provision FC5 or FC6. (If you're already running an FC server, you can upgrade your image via the normal yum upgrade procedures.)

As many of you have noticed we've just rolled out some new features. This is an incremental release that include stable changes while we continue to work on enhancing our service. The changes released are:

Rescue mode. This allows you to boot to an emergency VM and access your primary servers file system. You can control rescue mode from the vclient and switch back to production status at any time.

Reverse DNS for multiple IP addresses. For those of you with multiple IP addresses, you can now select 'DNS' to edit all entries, including your secondary IP's. (Previously you could only control your primary.)

Usability Enhancements. We've made changes to the way you control your server. You should notice this within a minute or two of logging in. We've also resolved several minor bugs (such as actions taking you to your primary server if you have multiple servers) and more.

Take a look and let us know what you think. As always, your continued feedback is an important part of our improvement process. Look for another release that closes out our remaining to-do list within the next several weeks and several exiting additions.

Best,
The VR Team

We've updated our Gentoo 2007.0. Enhancements include an update portage, as well as a fix for servers that hang when the "reboot" command is issued from the console.

For existing customers with Gentoo servers you can apply this by editing /etc/conf.d/rc and changing the RC_NET_STRICT_CHECKING setting to 'lo'. from 'no'.

You spoke, and we listened! We are pleased to announce that effective immediately, every VR Virtual Server has two CPU’s available at no additional cost.

Existing customers who want to take advantage of this have been upgraded already and simply need to reboot their machines in order to see the second CPU.

Update: Instead of rebooting within the VM, please use the control panel to issue a full shutdown command, then issue a start command. We've determined that if you issue a reboot you may not see your CPU's.

New customers may sign up for a plan at http://www.vr.org and any new server provisioned will be built with two CPU’s.

Let us know if you have any comments or questions. We’re excited at this change and the additional value available to our customers at no cost.

Look for more exiting upgrades and features soon and be sure to continue providing us with feedback on how we can improve our service. Some of the new functionality available in our upcoming release is outlined on our blog at http://blog.vr.org/vr/2007/09/september-updat.html.

Best regards,
The VR Team

September Update

We’ve been looking at our own blog in our favorite readers here at VR and can hear the crickets chirping! <excuse>We’ve got a ton to say and share, but were swamped with VMworld last week and have been working away on our next major upgrade. </excuse>

I thought I’d share a few of the things that we’re working on. To start with, our goal is to provide a high quality, stable environment. This is a fundamental belief that we have and you’ll see that mirrored in our service. Today we have a clear set of stable, self-service functionality. We don’t believe in jumping straight to bells and whistles.

The other thing we believe in is availability and flexibility, and we’ve built our system for this from the ground up. You shouldn’t need to sign up on a waiting list to get an account with us or adding a new server. We don’t believe in charging you for re-provisioning, and our vclient allows you to destroy and rebuild your server as often as you need.

Our immediate priority is to bring additional critical functionality into the service and continue to enhance features. Our short list looks like this.

1. Rescue-mode: Allows you to boot your system into rescue mode so that you can repair your server. You’ll be able to go in and out of rescue mode from our vclient web interface as necessary and for any amount of time.
2. Additional IP address: You’ll be able to purchase additional IP addresses as well as manage their reverses from our vclient very shortly. (Note: we’ll charge $2/mo per ip in 1, 5, or 10 ip blocks.)
3. DNS Management: We don’t view this as critical, but a surprising number of you have requested this. Our plan is to pull our existing zoneconfig.com functionally into vclient so that you have one interface to manage both forward and reverse dns records.
4. Enhanced reporting on bandwidth, cpu, ram usage, etc.

On the service side of things, we’re planning to give everyone access to two CPU’s for performance bursting and further re-evaluate our ratio’s. We’ve also been testing Xen Enterprise 4.0 which will include native 64bit support and a myriad of other features. (look for a separate post about Xen and why we’re using a paid for, commercially supported version in the future..)

We’re also working on several tweaks and minor bugfixes to both images and functionality within our vclient. Lower priority items such as web based console and ssh client are on the list but likely several releases out. You’ll be seeing the first three items listed above very soon.

As for other items, we continue to be very appreciative and customer driven. If you believe we’re missing a critical feature not addressed above, drop us a line and we’ll consider it.

We’ve updated our Gentoo 2007.0 template. The new image includes the latest portage as of 9/2/2007 and the system profile has also been tweaked to point to 2007.0.

If you’ve already installed a Gentoo virtual server, you can make these changes by performing the steps outlined in the Gentoo handbook. Note that this is not necessary but recommended. From the handbook:

If a release (such as 2007.0 for x86) introduces a new profile, you have the choice to migrate to the new profile.
Naturally, you are not forced to do so, and you can continue to use the old profile and just update your packages as explained in the Gentoo Handbook.

Thanks to Nicholas for bringing the profile to our attention.

As a long-time computer user I’ve worked extensively with many different platforms and operating systems. On the day-job side of things desktops were inevitably windows based in order to support mundane documentation, presentations, etc. It was easy enough to console out to a linux box, after all.

For my personal systems I gravitated towards Linux and once the Intel Macs came out made the switch to OSX. I won’t go into the details here, but as many who have experienced this I felt like I should have made the change far earlier. Change is difficult. People often stay with an inferior and frustrating solution to avoid disrupting their environment.

Once I discovered Parallels the windows desktops became a thing of the past. No more converting files. No saving visio diagrams as .xsd to open in Graffle on the Mac. I had a seamless way to work in both worlds. Intel + Mac + Parallels + Windows = Bliss. Sed, grep, awk, and oh my! On the mac shell! (Ok, enough said..)

Enter the newcomer (in terms of Mac, anyway) VMware with their Fusion product. I skipped the free Beta and snickered at their YouTube videos. The nifty drop-shadows around windows and 3d support for games aren't a compelling reason. Why should I bother? The Fusion teams official top 10 list doesn't offer anything ground-breaking, either.

The answer is two-fold. As any true computer addict, err, enthusiast I’m intensely curious about new things. The hype over Fusion and VMware’s extensive engineering arm being able to displace a well established player in the field. And the fact that I’m eying one of the new iMacs to replace my desktop at home. Windows will be a necessity and so the opportunity to try Fusion in a non-invasive way has presented itself.

Before starting I’ve decided on a short list of assumptions and criteria:

1. I like parallels. I like the cohesive feature and with a few exceptions everything else. I’m also not a parallels power user. I use windows when I need it and typically as a last resort.
2. The exceptions and nit-picky things I don’t like about Parallels in order of annoyance factor:
   1. When my mac switches from wired to wireless networking Parallels often doesn’t seem to get it. I have to reboot in order to use the net within windows.
   2. Windows sessions that resume from hibernate seem slow to resume and slightly broken afterwards. I’ve learned to completely shut down my vm and start it fresh each time I use it.
   3. The cohesive feature is slick – but rough around the edges. The fragments of windows that painstakingly redraw on some minimize or start menu actions is painful.
   4. Parallels seems CPU intensive and has caused strange issues (mostly resolved) with my host not being able to go to sleep. Running to another building without your charger only to find your laptop dead is @!#!.
   5. Switching between O/S running (I have an Ubuntu VM along with windows.) seems kludgy at best. It should be much easier to start and manage multiple environments.
3. If I’m going to make the switch to Fusion on a new system it should address all of the above. If I’m going to actually change to Parallels it will need to provide a seamless upgrade path. That is, importing or being able to simply boot my parallels VM’s. Worse then changing software is the thought of having to locate my XP cd/product key and go through a windows installation.

Let’s see how things go. I’ll post an update once I’ve concluded my trial-run with fusion. (I’ll have talked my wife into letting me buy a new iMac as well ☺ )

It took all of about 30 minutes to customize our new blog template using TypePad's advanced templates. While not perfect, it's a good start and we plan to perfect the blog look and feel over time.

(we are all about iterative development @ VR!)

We've configured a new blog for our VR Virtual Service. A big fan of hosted applications, we've opted to use TypePad's hosted blog service instead of installing wordpress/etc. in our own infrastructure.

It's always interesting to explore a hosted application and we'll see how well we can customize TypePad to integrate into our site template. Look for further updates soon.