Build a VPS Host in 24 Hours: Debian Virtual Machine Setup (Page 1)

Return to tutorial index.

Once your VPS server comes back online from its reboot, you're ready to install your first virtual machine. Open a new web browser window and navigate to "https://vpsdevel:8333" to access your server's control panel. If necessary, replace "vpsdevel" with the hostname you assigned to your server. You may need to add an entry to your workstation's "hosts" file or your network's DNS server to resolve the hostname. If you wish, you can also use the server's IP address in place of the hostname. Accept any security warnings regarding the SSL certificate, and you'll be presented with a login screen. Log in using your Ubuntu username and password. Some statistics on your server's CPU, memory, and disk usage are displayed. Click "Create Virtual Machine" in the upper right area of the control center. You'll be asked to assign a name to your virtual machine.

For the guest operating system type, there isn't an entry for Debian 5 (Lenny), so choose "Other Linux (64-bit)" instead. I've found this produces more stable results than selecting Debian 4. If you're on a 64-bit platform, you can install either the 32-bit or 64-bit version of Debian, but I prefer to stick with 64-bit versions of most operating systems for an exact match to my production environments.

For memory and processors, assign 256 MB of RAM to your virtual machine. If your host server has a lot of RAM, you can increase this amount; my example server only has 2 GB of RAM available, so I'm pretty conservative with memory assignments. Keep in mind that this will be a development VPS, and won't be subject to high traffic. If you're using a dual-core or better processor, you can assign multiple CPUs to the virtual machine. If you're using a single core processor and select "2" here, the VPS will see two simulated CPUs.

Choose to create a new virtual hard disk, and give it a reasonable amount of space. Later on, we'll be installing Debian as a development web server environment with ISPConfig 2.2, so we don't need a lot of space. Select the options to allocate all disk space now and split the disk into 2 GB files. This increases performance somewhat, and makes it easier to back up virtual disk files to DVD-ROM if desired.

Continue