The availability of a physical server running OpenVZ is more critical than the availability of a typical PC server. Since it runs multiple virtual machines and containers providing a number of critical services, physical server outage might be very costly. It can be as disastrous as the simultaneous outage of a number of servers running critical services.
To increase physical server availability, we suggest that you follow the recommendations below:
- Use a RAID storage for critical virtual machines and containers. Do prefer hardware RAIDs, but software mirroring RAIDs might suit too as a last resort.
- Do not run any software on the server itself. Create special virtual machines and containers where you can host necessary services such as BIND, FTPD, HTTPD, and so on. On the server, you need only the SSH daemon. Preferably, it should accept connections from a pre-defined set of IP addresses only.
- Do not create users on the server itself. You can create as many users as you need in any virtual machine and container. Remember: compromising the server means compromising all virtual machines and containers as well.
