Which product for our business?

Help! (Home for newbies)
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Despite the docs and info I’ve read on the forums, and since I haven’t been able to try the demo, I’m still fairly confused about virtualmin and cloudmin, what they do, and where they could fit in our business model. I’m looking for a fit for a new business we are rolling out. Let me explain what we need and maybe someone can help me and explain which *min product(s) will work…

In a nutshell we will be offering cloud based storage services with applications available to users on the same cloud server. We are planning on using Proxmox with Debian containers. Although mostly transparent to the user, each customer will have their own VPS with limited access via a user control panel. We may have many containers deployed on 1 server.

A customer will have a login to a control panel. From there they’ll be able to install, upgrade, and uninstall applications. There will also be links to access applications with web interfaces, and documentation on how to use our services.

I’m a long time user of webmin (maybe 20+years?), and have recently discovered usermin. I have configured usermin to allow non-root users to install, upgrade, and uninstall certain apps as root (using webmin Custom Commands). This works great however since I will have webmin and usermin installed on every VPS, if I want to give customers access to another app, or make any other changes like documentation, or anything else, I’ll have to do it for every VPS container. This would be fine for 3 containers, but not 1000. So…

Is there a way to have 1 global webmin that controls everything for all usermin’s in each VPS? Is that a function of either virtualmin or cloudmin? Or does virtualmin manage vms like Proxmox, and cloudmin manage multiple virtualmins? If that’s what it does I don’t think that accomplishes what I am looking for.

I’ve seen the webmin cluster module, is that my best bet and will it work for managing webmin installs for VPS’s? If not, what do you suggest?

Also, does usermin (or any *min product) allow me to create html pages for users accessible from within their control panel, for documentation and instructions? For example we could provide documentation on how to install apps or use their new service.

If any of the *min products don’t fit, does anyone have any other suggestions? Thanks.

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Howdy,

Virtualmin is a web hosting control panel, used to manage users and domains on one particular server.

Cloudmin is for managing VPS’s… Cloudmin GPL can manage KVM or Xen VPS’s on one server.

Cloudmin Pro can manage a variety of different types of VPS’s, across any number of servers. Cloudmin Pro also supports various types of redundancy and failover.

There isn’t really a way to control all Usermin instances from one server… you’d need to log into each individual server.

Cloudmin can provide the admin with a way to manage all the Virtualmin based servers though, by providing a central place the admin can login and access the systems. There’s also a command line interface, that would allow you to run commands on all the systems, or download files onto them all. That could aid you in rolling out modifications to large numbers of containers.

You could even do that with Cloudmin for Physical Systems… which isn’t designed for managing VPS’s, but is instead designed largely for tieing together Virtualmin systems (it’s fine if the systems happen to be a VPS, like they would be in your case – it just can’t manage the VPS).

I hope that gets you going in the right direction! Feel free to ask any other questions you might have.

-Eric

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Thanks for the reply Eric.

It looks like Usermin is not a good fit for our needs. But what about virtualmin? Will it allow end users to run scripts as root to install apps like usermin (called custom commands)? Would it be a fit for our business model? Thanks again.