Recommendations and possible caveats on setup (Windows Server > Ubuntu > Webmin)

Running Webmin in Ubuntu in Windows Server Hyper-V.

Webmin Version 2.21
OS Ubuntu Linux 22.04.2
Processor information	Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2683 v4 @ 2.10GHz, 12 cores	
Real memory	1.23 GiB used / 851.44 MiB cached / 62.89 GiB total	
Virtual memory	0 bytes used / 1.99 GiB total
Local disk space	54 GiB used / 953.29 GiB free / 1007.3 GiB total

I have allocated approximately 30% of the servers current HW resources, which seem ample. Not extremely happy about the additional OS layers, but I need to have this configuration for now. There are things running in that Windows I cannot easily replace.

Webmin allows me to have so many additional things controlling and monitoring the Ubuntu OS that I would have to spend hours and weeks putting together otherwise. File manager, storage, mapped storage, terminal, hardware monitoring etc
 All in a good UI. Which leads me to the final layer, Portainer. I have installed Portainer and several additional apps that I require for different purposes, like network monitoring, docs platform, stats platform, and many more things .

However. I wonder. You see that 1TB of space? It is on a LFF HDD Raid5 on an LSI 3108, managed with MSM. Disks are 5400RPM NAS drives from Toshiba. Allocated via Hyper-V.

I know I would be better off with a PCIE SDD RAID1 card, with at least 2 M.2 NVME drives but do anyone have any performance numbers on that? Webmin and all the hosted apps work very well, but it is kind of hard to measure I/O in this configuration. And how much do I loose via the Hyper-V layer? Article . Not overly concerned about that, but nice to get an opinion.

Another thing rumbling around in the brain is the need for some more advanced web app hosting techs, like MySQL and similar. So far what I have installed with Portainer/Docker did not require anything but a basic yaml conf, even oneliners like docker pull whatever, but If I get something that needs MySQL, where would it be best to add that? In Webmin or as a Docker container? Maybe I should ask the ones behind relevant distro, but since Webmin is kind of made for this, hosing web apps, while Docker is a more general tool.

Feel free to pitch in with any and all concerns you might want to highlight.

Hi, if you are pro user you can ask ‘@staff’ and they will help you out. If you are gpl user you can hire out some freelancer supporting virtualmin or perhaps search web for solution by your self.

I’m honestly not sure of the IO tradeoffs between different storage types, but certainly RAID1 on NVME will be faster! Whether CPU, RAM or storage is the most important for performance depends a lot on your expected workload - like are you serving a lot of static websites, or are running a database-intensive dynamic site, or serving up a lot of large files?

We’re not really the right folks to ask about hardware choices and Windows Server Hyper-V. It’s just not among our areas of expertise.

But, if performance matters, 5400 RPM spinning disks do not make sense. SSDs are an order of magnitude faster for seeks and also much faster for reading and writing. It doesn’t make sense to deploy spinning rust for any performance critical environment.

@Jamie @Joe
Thanks for input.

Nope, only serving some internal systems for monitoring, storage and documentation. Strictly off the web.

Yes, I am aware of the “rust” issues and have no problems being reminded of it :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: . The server in question was originally built to run ZFS with TrueNAS Scale, but for different reasons I won’t go in to here, I skipped that plan. HDD’s are adequate for the storage part of that, while not so much for the system.

The reason I asked was more oriented towards if you have come across a scenario where anyone did something similar, Hyper-V > Linux > Webmin. As usual, stumbling over another person running the same configuration is often a source for exchange of ideas and solutions.

Then why ask about performance if it doesn’t matter?

@unborn please don’t tag us in on random topics, even if you reckon we’re the best people to answer. We do our best to read and respond any time we can and feel like we have something useful to add. Pro users can PM us for individual priority support.

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If anything I was asking about ways to measure I/O in this context.

Try using Webmin Stats History on the Dashboard, it should show Disk I/O, e.g.:

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