Hi. I’m just getting started and looking at using Virtualmin to help me manage hosting clients. I have 5 physical servers running XCP-ng as their hypervisor, and I have 3 public IPv4 addresses. For IPv6 I have an allocated /48. I have about 50 domains and 100 users all on unmanaged, artisanally hand-crafted stuff. To move to Virtualmin I would have to migrate all this stuff.
Does Virtualmin assume/require a single public IPv4 address per physical host? I have more physical servers than public IPv4 addresses. I’m basically asking: is there a workable strategy to have more Virtualmin physical hosts than routable IPv4 addresses? Can I get 3 VMs on 3 hosts that own all the ports on the 3 IPs, and then have them distribute traffic across more than 3 back end hosts?
It seems like Virtualmin expects to be installed on the bare metal OS. Am I reading that right? I tend to use Xen Orchestra to manage VMs on my XCP hypervisor and, left to my own ideas, I would launch a VM with Virtualmin in it on each physical host. It can still use XAPI to contact hypervisor systems and launch VMs, etc. I try to keep the bare-metal hypervisor basically empty. Does that work? Any gotchas or pitfalls I should look out for?
Lastly, if I try the GPL version on a few domains to get familiar with it, how hard is it to upgrade to the Pro version if I like it? All my stuff is currently hand-built and weird, so I’m gonna have to figure out how to migrate/convert systems over to Virtualmin by hand. That’s on me. But assuming I run the GPL version, move a few over, and they work well, I’d just buy the pro license and convert it all. Is there anything to be aware of going down that route? Alternatively, the Pro is only $7.50 for 10 domains, which is cheap enough to play with. If I buy that small license, and my test migrations go well, is it easy to upgrade the Pro license from 10-domain, paid monthly to the 100-domain, paid annually?
Not sure why you think Virtualmin prefers ‘bare metal’. Put it on a Virtual Machine and install it. I think most of your questions will be answered once you take the software for a shake down cruise.
Fair point, there’s a lot in there. The licensing question was answered easily. So I’ll go spin up a GPL instance and see what I can do. Can we just focus on the one question:
If I have more hosting servers than I have public IPv4s, how do I distribute the load? And are there some install-time choices I should be sure to do a certain way, so that it works right?
Sure, you could use private IPs for that. Virtualmin is already working on a bunch of cloud providers that have private IPs with load balancers in front. You just need to configure Virtualmin appropriately.
Virtualmin also supports IPv6. I’m not sure how it behaves without an IPv4 address, though. I only have dual stack hosts, so I’ve never set up Virtualmin on IPv6-only, but I’ve seen other people who have (and we recently enabled IPv6 on both of our download servers to enable easier installation).
Bare metal has nothing to do with it. I haven’t run Virtualmin on bare metal in 15 years. Cloudmin is our virtual machine management tool, that runs on bare metal. Virtualmin pretty much always runs in virtual machines, for like 90% of our users.
Not hard. It’s in the menu, you give it your license information, and it performs the upgrade. Assuming the package manager is appropriately configured and you installed everything using packages on a supported OS, you’ll be fine.
I think you’re making a mistake with this plan. Easier to install Virtualmin on a freshly installed OS and then copy over the hand-built and weird stuff. We have (old) docs for manual installation, but they’ve been unmaintained for a long time because we figured out that the kind of time it could take trying to support people doing that was wholly unsustainable. And the level of frustration people experienced was bad for business. They’d find new problems every day for months that just came from misconfiguration in Virtualmin and not matching up the way their system was setup with the way Virtualmin interacts with it (Virtualmin is crazily configurable, partly because we used to be fine with this kind of hodgepodge approach to deployment, but the cost in time is way too high).
Anyway, upgrading to Pro and upgrading a Pro license is easy. (Combining licenses is not easy, so don’t buy a bunch of small annual licenses if you plan to deploy everything to one big server later. We can’t really do that kind of license math with the billing system.)
All these replies are really helpful (and quick!). Thanks.
I am explaining badly. Because I have big hosts with lots of VMs, I can create new VMs that have Webmin/Virtualmin installed the way it wants. Then, when I think I have a working Webmin/Virtualmin ecosystem, I will try creating Webmin virtual servers for some existing hand-crafted domains to learn how to switch over. Since it’s clear that I don’t need to change my bare metal hypervisors, this seems like a straightforward plan.
I also get it that I’m asking for free help. I’d be happy to pay some consulting rates to someone who wants to spend a couple paid hours helping me map this out and figure out how I make it fit my needs. If someone is interested in a couple hours consulting, PM me or post info as a reply.
My ultimate goal is to offer a bit of self-service internet hosting. I.e., people come to a storefront (e.g., like WHMCS?), buy a plan, and then Virtualmin deploys it (right?) and the customer’s interface to what they bought is Webmin (right?). I have no delusions of grandeur like becoming some gigantic hosting company, but I need some automation to allow relative strangers to purchase services, bill them, and give them a self-service control panel, let them upload web pages or activate wordpress or whatever.
So I’m trying to build a mental model. I’ve got 5 physical hosts and 3 public IPs. So I think I create 1 VM per host and give it generous resources (12 CPUs, 64G RAM). Then the virtual servers are created by the various Virtualmin VMs. But there are gaps in my mental model. I can’t figure out whether I’m creating big Webmin VMs or Virtualmin VMs or both on each physical host. I’m a little unclear on public DNS for NS records, MX records, etc. (which IPs do I publish? The customers need to publish those same IPs at their domain registrars). And that load balancer at the edge distributing connections across the internal servers: That’s something I’m going to have to create (or is it?).
If you’re selling shared hosting, then, yes, Virtualmin deploys it.
Webmin is a root-level administrative tool in the general case. Unless you’re selling virtual machines where the end user gets root, they do not get full Webmin access. They would get a Virtualmin domain-owner account.
I think I have to mirror the advice from @ID10T: Install it and try it out. Maybe watch some of our videos.
Conceptually, I think maybe you’re trying to make Virtualmin+Webmin like cPanel+WHM, which is not how Virtualmin works. Everyone (except mail users) logs into the same thing (Webmin, but a Virtualmin domain owner user will only see the limited functionality they need to manage their website, mail users, databases, etc.). Mail users might use Usermin, which is our webmail client with some other features, but we offer an installer for RoundCube and SquirrelMail in GPL and maybe one or two other webmail clients in Pro.
For all the other technical stuff, you’re going to need to break this down into specific, concise questions, and put them into their own dedicated topics with a good title, to get good answers. I’m not capable of juggling a bunch of different questions and concepts in one thread (this is my own failing, but I’m the person best able to answer any questions you have, so if you want to get good answers, it’s best for you to accommodate my particular disability). There’s too much in this thread, so break it down into specifics (and try Virtualmin, it is free and literally only takes a few minutes to install…just follow our installation docs on the download page).
