[TriLUG] Hosting multiple WordPress sites - VMWare or OpenVZ

[Ron Kelley]

Greetings all,

I am working on a project to start hosting multiple (potentially hundreds of) WordPress sites in our data center rack.  After doing some research, I am trying to decide between hosting the sites in a CentOS VM, or use OpenVZ and create a VPS container for each customer.  Since we already have VMWare deployed in the infrastructure, installing CentOS/LAMP in a VM with apache's virtual hosting was my first choice.  

One of my concerns is if one of the WordPress sites get compromised, other customers' sites may get compromised as well.  From this perspective, VPS containers seem more secure, but I am less familiar with the OpenVZ environment.  I also understand performance issues in one VPS container is not supposed to affect other containers.  However, customers running inside the same VM will definitely get affected by a rogue site.

Can anyone provide some insight or first-hand-knowledge comparing a VPS to a VM when trying to host multiple word press sites inside the same "container"?  I need to look at security, performance, reliability, and backup/restore capabilities.

For what it's worth, the server is very powerful - 2x 6-core Intel Xeon CPUs (3.4GHz) with 96GB RAM.  I figured that should be plenty of horsepower to host many WordPress sites; I just need to find the right OS "container" to host them.

Thanks for any input,

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Ron Kelley
rkelleyrtp at gmail.com