[LightDestory]

Hi all, recently VirMach announced the upgrade of their OpenVZ nodes to KVM technologies, so I through that this would be the right time to make my review about my current VPS 9 from Buffalo by VirMach .

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Short introduction

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I have started using this VPS since September 2019. I choose VPS 9 from all the other VPSes available during September's giveaway mainly for two reasons:

1. I was a newly member so my chance to win the other VPSes was really little due to my low credits and VPS 9 winning conditions is different compared to standard VPSes, in fact my request was for VPS 18 and VPS 9, so you should know how it ended.
   
2. Let's be clear, VPS 9 is very powerful: a lot of RAM, fast and huge SSD storage and two logical core a 2.20GHz and TOS that are not so restricting. For my needs as developer VPS 9 seemed like a heaven.
   

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Review

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To talk about this VPS first we need to know it! So let's start listing the specs of this amazing and powerful VPS:

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Specifications

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Disk Space: 100 GB SSD

RAM: 8 GB

IP Addresses: 1x IPv4 & 3 IPv6**

Virtualization: OpenVZ

Monthly Traffic: 4 TB

Location: Buffalo (US)

Control Panel: No CP for the Holder

Connection: 1Gbps

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** This information was taken from the official VPS Plans listing but currently on the actual VPS there isn't any IPv6.
I have already reported this to the staff here, let's wait for their response.

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Benchmark

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Before writing my experience and though about this VPS let's see the results of the Post4VPS's benchmark script by @sohamb03:

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System Info

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Processor : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2660 0 @ 2.20GHz
CPU Cores : 2
Frequency : 2200.192 MHz
Memory : 8192 MB
Swap : 0 MB
Uptime : 19 days, 1:46
OS    : CentOS Linux 7 (Core)
Arch : x86_64 (64 Bit)
Kernel : 2.6.32-042stab127.2
Hostname : *JUST A NORMAL HOSTNAME*

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Speedtest (IPv4 only)

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Location        Provider Speed

CDN        Cachefly 13.0MB/s
Atlanta, GA, US        Coloat 908KB/s
Dallas, TX, US        Softlayer 36.5MB/s
Seattle, WA, US        Softlayer 21.7MB/s
San Jose, CA, US        Softlayer 23.3MB/s
Washington, DC, US        Leaseweb 13.0MB/s
Sao Paulo, Brazil               Softlayer 14.3MB/s
Singapore        Softlayer 664KB/s
Taiwan                          Hinet           5.21MB/s
Tokyo, Japan        Linode 12.2MB/s
Nuremberg, Germany        Hetzner 2.55MB/s
Rotterdam, Netherlands        id3.net 16.3MB/s
Haarlem, Netherlands        Leaseweb 45.8MB/s
Milan, Italy        Softlayer 16.3MB/s
Melbourne, AU        Softlayer 7.62MB/s

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Disk Speed

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I/O (1st run) : 497 MB/s
I/O (2nd run) : 542 MB/s
I/O (3rd run) : 485 MB/s
Average I/O : 508 MB/s

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My experience

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I am a developer so after winning the VPS I wanted to start setting up my own environment, unfortunately I started my experience with the find-out of the OpenVZ's limitation with available OS. I wanted to use Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS but it wasn't available, the latest usable distro is 16.04 that has already reached EOL. I switched to CentOS 7 and successful started setting up the environment: nginx, php, mysql, firewall, securing ssh, ect...
Soon after I met another issue: OpenVZ configuration conflicts with Network Manager when trying to install remote desktop environment.
After that I discovered that one of the most famous container environment as Docker isn't well supported with the custom kernel provided by OpenVZ's developers.
Since then my VPS has been happily running my services without any issue and downtime.
As said by the staff, VPSes 9 are unmanaged ones, if you know how use unix-like OS you are ready to go. You can live together with the limitations listed above and you can find workaround and fixes for some of them.
You can see the on-going on the VPS following my domain: lightdestory's site

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Conclusion

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I will not write a lot as conclusion because VirMach already announced the upgrade from OpenVZ to KVM technologies so my some of the issue said above will be likely fixed.
But here some important point:

• VPS 9 will be remain UNMANAGED: you need to know what are you doing;
  
• VPS 9 doesn't come with Control Panel, so for particular actions you will need staff's support;
  

I suggest VPS 9 to everyone that HAS A DISCRETE KNOWLEDGE OF LINUX and needs a powerful machine and a lot of resources, currently it has some limitation due to OpenVZ but as soon as my VPS will switch over KVM I will write here or on a new post a new review with the new hardware and performance.

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