Question

Create a VPS Server in a home computer

Answer 1

For this we will use a virtualization on virtualbox, we can also use vmware and xen.
We can use different operating systems we will start virtualizing a Linux distribution and for that we choose Centos, we will download CentOS version 6.2 or more advanced from www.centos.org .

We also install in this case virtualbox that is well known in home computers.

Then we started to create the virtual machine, with the virtualbox assistant, selected that we are going to virtualize linux and also a distribution derived from Red HAT, that is CentOS.

Recall that as it will be a VPS server we will install the version of linux without desktop in text mode. We will assign 512 to 1024 mb of ram, if you want to allocate more you can, but with 1 gb this is fine.

We select to create a virtual hard disk and the space to occupy. We have 2 types of space

Reserved dynamically : It means that the space that our virtual machine will occupy will grow
Fixed size : We will select the size and it will not be modified.

After configuring the virtual disk, we will continue and ask us to select how the operating system will be installed from an iso file or from a cd / dvd.

When starting, the installation of the operating system in the virtual machine will begin.

We installed the CentOS operating system like any other Linux distribution, where we were asked to configure language, location, keyboard, network access, etc.

One of the steps where you will request the type of installation to determine which basic software packages will be installed.

We can choose according to the performance or tasks that we want to perform with our vps a preconfiguration to install. So we have for example a webserver option that will install apache, php, mysql and will not install desktop.

Then, when continuing, it will request to restart the virtual machine and it will be ready to operate. We can install a free control panel like webmin and create users and domain to manage the administration of a vps or develop and test modules and components for the server or for the control panel.

If we do not want to install the whole virtual machine or we want to try several with different distributions, on the web http://virtualboximages.com/ we can download several virtual machines pre-configured and ready to work, just add them to virtualbox.

In this case we will have access to our vps at http: // ipdelvps: 10000 from any browser, where the ip is the ip of the machine and 10000 is the connection port.

If we have a dynamic ip that changes every time we connect, we can simulate dns with No-ip or DynDNS.org.

It can also be used to provide SSH , Samba service to Windows and Linux or Mac computers and share resources in a network.

Here we have seen how to do it with Virtualbox but the most common is to use Xen for being the most scalable and best performance, but virtualbox is much easier to configure.

Xen and vmware are the most chosen solution to virtualize Linux and virtualbox to virtualize Windows.

In addition you should also evaluate the trend of Cloud server, such as XenCloud Platform to create a Cloud vps (Virtual Server in the cloud) also in virtualbox.

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