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Ramhost.us KVM VPS Review
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Ramhost.us KVM VPS Review

fanfan Veteran
edited September 2011 in Reviews

Hello all, I want to share my personal review of my brand new ramhost.us KVM VPS. :)

This VPS is their LA Standard plan:

CPU:

Xeon E3 is running blazing fast!

root@tp:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor   : 0
vendor_id   : GenuineIntel
cpu family  : 6
model       : 2
model name  : QEMU Virtual CPU version 0.15.0
stepping    : 3
cpu MHz     : 3093.174
cache size  : 4096 KB
fdiv_bug    : no
hlt_bug     : no
f00f_bug    : no
coma_bug    : no
fpu     : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level : 4
wp      : yes
flags       : fpu de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic mtrr pge mca cmov pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx lm up pni cx16 popcnt hypervisor lahf_lm
bogomips    : 6186.34
clflush size    : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes   : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:

Network:

Their network in LA's latency is 170ms to 180ms to central China, excellent!

root@tp:~# wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test -O /dev/null
--2011-09-21 19:35:07--  http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: ?.dev/null?

100%    [===========================================================================    =======================================>] 104,857,600 16.3M/s   in 4.6s    

2011-09-21 19:35:12 (21.5 MB/s) - ?.dev/null?.saved [104857600/104857600]

I/O speed with ext4:

root@tp:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync && rm test
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 8.78568 s, 122 MB/s

Control Panel:

Clean, useful and easy to use, seems to have an automatic unmounting of CDrom function, although a little out of fashion.

Overall performance:

I didn't feel any lag when setting up the LEMP stack, the node should be running smoothly without being overcrowded. The performance is good, considering the CPU, network and disk I/O peformance, I think their first try of KVM is quite successful. Hope to see more KVM providers to join this battle field. :)

One news I heard in the IRC channel is their LA will be out of stock for a while, but their KVM plans in Kansas city is coming this Saturday!

Comments

  • +1 for the review. Thanks.

    model name : QEMU Virtual CPU version 0.15.0

    Just curious as I haven't seen that before. (I'll admit that I don't look at the reviews as closely as I should.) Where is that coming from? Is that a sign that it's running KVM?

  • Yes, KVM uses QEMU emulation.

    Thanked by 1drmike
  • Thanks. It's just weird that I could have sworn with the other platforms, it still says what the processor is.

  • drmike said: Thanks. It's just weird that I could have sworn with the other platforms, it still says what the processor is.

    yup, most other virtualisation platforms do tell you what the underlying cpu is, but qemu systems strip this info.

    for the paranoid scammy providers can use really crappy hardware and you really won't be able to tell disprove.

  • Zigga said: for the paranoid scammy providers can use really crappy hardware and you really won't be able to tell disprove.

    YEp, at this point I still don't believe that is an E3...

  • Good overview/specs of an interesting provider, thanks fan!

    I'm curious about their custom control panel and its KVM support. I assume it's an "install from ISOs" setup, do they have a very big list of available ISOs, and do they accept requests for additional ISOs? Install is over VNC, I assume, or is it some sort of SSH to serial connection?

    How configurable are the QEMU features, can you change network adapter types (e.g. Intel, Realtek)? Enable/disable APIC, ACPI, PAE?

    Do they support virtio? Oh, and were your benchmarks using virtio, or virtual ide/virtual e1000?

    Regarding CPU model:
    QEMU-KVM defaults to a "generic" cpu to allow for easier migration of images from host hardware to host hardware (I suppose it's more important for OSes like Windows than Linux, which should be fine with seeing a CPU change). If you run it with the "-cpu host" flag, it does actually report the name of the underlying CPU instead of "QEMU Virtual CPU version 0.15.0". That also gives you full access to all the extra hardware on the CPU, like newer SSEs, AES acceleration, etc., though maybe there's security concerns allowing such access on a shared host?

    Anyway, even if you do see a model name under on your KVM VPS, it doesn't mean that's really what's in there. A host could easily write up a new CPU model definition for QEMU and have it show any name and feature flags they want (it comes with defaults for spoofing things like a Nehalem i7, an Opteron 23xx, and an Atom N270).

    I don't mean that as a complaint about QEMU-KVM, I'm sure it's quite possible to spoof the CPU under VMWare, Xen, OpenVZ, etc. too :P

  • ramnetramnet Member, Host Rep
    edited September 2011

    Thanks for the positive review :-)

    @yomero "YEp, at this point I still don't believe that is an E3..."

    Perhaps this will convince you: http://vz1.lax.rhnx.net/psi/
    :)

    I'm quite sure most people here would agree we aren't a "scammy provider"

  • ramnetramnet Member, Host Rep
    edited September 2011

    @fanovpn

    Lot of questions there. Please forgive me if I miss any.

    1) Yes, it's an "install from .iso" setup, although we are also working on adding kvm precreated os templates in the near future as well.

    2) Yes, we take requests for custom .iso's. I actually just added slackware yesterday and trixbox today on user request.

    3) Yes, install is over VNC

    4) As far as reconfigurability of QEMU features, we can adjust those over a support ticket if requested (the panel does not support user modification of that as yet). By default we provision with a SCSI emulated hard disk and an Intel e1000 network adapter, which delivers very close to the performance virtio does without any virtio issues (virtio stability varies considerably in guest os's - we have found that any guest os that isn't running linux 2.6.32 tends to have issues with virtio which is why we don't enable it by default).

    5) Yes, it's fairly easy to spoof a cpu model on basically any virtualization platform.

    6) We're aware of the "-cpu host" flag and I'm investigating any potential downside or risks of enabling that flag on our servers.

    Thanked by 1fanovpn
  • Yes, it's fairly easy to spoof a cpu model on basically any virtualization platform.

    And considering it's just copy and paste....

  • @ramnet NOOOOOOOOOO!!! You are a faker!!! j/k

    I mean, QEMU doesn't show anyting about the real CPU, so, from the VPS point of view, you can't convince me that is an E3 (@fan in this case). But yes, I believe you xD

  • @ramnet > ramnet said: I'm quite sure most people here would agree we aren't a "scammy provider"

    I knew this would happen, I was infact a happy customer! I didn't mean ramhost, just for the paranoid folk in the LEB community.

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