Physical Servers

Last modified: 25 Dec 2007

WARNING: This documentation covers Parallels H-Sphere versions up to 3.1. For the latest up-to-date Parallels H-Sphere documentation, please proceed to the official Parallels site.

Physical servers (also referred to as boxes) are represented by physically or virtually separate computers with their own operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD Unix, or Windows). Physical servers can be emulated with VPS, VMWare or other software packages.

Separate physical servers are required for:

• Windows web hosting
• MS SQL user database hosting
• Windows real media hosting
• PostgresSQL user database hosting
• VPS hosting

Please refer to H-Sphere cluster charts that illustrate installations with different number of physical boxes.

Adding Physical Servers

To add a new physical server to H-Sphere:

1. In your admin control panel, go to E. Manager -> Servers -> Add P.Server.
2. Click Add Physical Server at the bottom of the page that appears.
3. Enter the name of the physical server, its IP and associated net mask:

   

   Specify Login and Password parameters:
   • For Windows servers, these are login (hsadmin by default) and password chosen when installing the Winbox.
   • For Unix servers, enter login: root and root password for this server.
   Don't enter IP2 and Mask2, they are not implemented for Linux and for Windows.
4. Click Submit.
5. Add server groups (types) of logical servers to be placed on this physical server.
   For example, if you add only web servers and mail servers groups, you won't be able to add any DNS servers to this physical server.
6. Go to E.Manager -> Servers -> P.Servers to see the newly added server in the list of all physical servers in the system.

To finish adding this physical server to H-Sphere, add to it also logical servers (services that you plan to place on it). Further steps are described in the Sysadmin Guide in the document on adding servers and services to H-Sphere.

Physical Server Controls

To see all physical servers in your H-Sphere cluster, go to E. Manager -> Servers -> P.Servers:

From this page you can:

• - choose Apache version for all Unix boxes and configure settings for Unix web boxes
• ! means that this physical server hasn't been physically added to the system
• - view system information for this server

  ( in H-Sphere 3.1 Beta 1) You can disable monitoring information for this server to preserve resources of the system. To do this, click the physical server title on the page E. Manager -> Servers -> P.Servers. Scroll down and click the button against Enable server info monitoring:

  

When this service is enabled, you can also view, from the System Information page, which packages and services are installed on the system and perform system service management.

See also:

Load balanced server clusters

Updating physical boxes from the CP interface ( in H-Sphere 3.1 Beta 1)

Physical server installation/update profiles ( in H-Sphere 3.1 Beta 1)

Deleting a Physical Server

A physical server can be deleted only if it's free of logical servers. To delete a physical server:

1. Go to E.Manager -> Servers -> P.Servers.
2. Click the name of the physical server you've decided to delete.
3. In the Used by section, find the Delete icon. It appears only if the server isn't used by any services: