Hey guys,

I just signed up but I have several technical questions about the design of the system. So I have one Linode instance and it appears that I can create several disk images under that one instance. However, it looks like I have one IP Address only.

So far I have created 2 disk images which have 2 Ubuntu instances. When I start my Linode, does it automatically start both Ubuntu instances? I would like to put a web server on each of the Ubuntu instances (this allows me to restart them separately if one of them goes wrong) and have intentions of putting different applications on each of the site. Is there a way for me to ssh into these 2 Ubuntu instances separately?

I'm more familiar with the 1 IP address, 1 disk image and thus only one place to login but I'm not familiar with how I will have access to these multiple images with 1 IP address?

Thanks!

You can only run one instance at a time on a linode.

By that, you mean I can only run one disk image at a time?

One configuration profile at a time.

For multiple concurrently running instances you'll want multiple Linodes.

Hope that helps!
-Chris

Thanks! That made sense!

OK, so Chris said you can run only one configuration profile at a time ... but a configuration profile can have multiple disk images. So, just to be sure, is Chris saying you can only run one disk image at a time?

You can have multiple disk images mounted at once but only one operating system running.

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Think of a Linode instance as a computer, and disk images as real physical disks. You can have many disks attached to it (via configuration profile), or many operating systems installed, but on one computer only one OS will run at the same time.

So I can have One Linode with two disks running at the same time? How do I ssh to the different disk images?

And what are the advantages of doing this instead of one image with several VPS'es for different sites?

2 disks != 2 OS's running at the same time.

Yes, "running", but you can only boot from one, or the other, just like in a physical computer, not from both at the same time.

So what is the benefit of using for example two ext3 disks?

There isn't one! (For what you're thinking of)

Each Linode disk image contains single partition, so if you wanted different partitions, you'd need more than one disk image, unless you want to roll your own partitioning solution on single disk image, which is not something I would advise because you lose backup ability for that image and you essentially run an abstraction atop abstraction atop abstraction.

Having said that, whether or not having multiple partitions is a benefit is open to discussion. Personally I like to separate stuff that requires journaling from temporary data, ro (root) vs rw (var and similar), etc...

If you're only going to have a single system, there isn't one. (Such as production environment websites.)

But if you're trying out two different Linux distros, but are going to use the exact same data (directory structure and files for websites, etc), both these distro installations can use the same partition for data (ie. one profile boots with distro X and mounts the data partition, and another profile boots with distro Y, also mounting the same data partition).