Windows licensing and startup

[Vlad]

Dear Flexiscale team.
There are some questions before we try the hosting.

1. As I understand, Windows (XP, SBS, 2003) instances are rented from Microsoft by your company. I just pay to Flexiscale for servers according to your terms and you pay Microsoft licensing fees. Is it true? If yes, do you plan to provide Windows images with Microsoft SQL Server installed under similar terms?
2. Our company considering Flexiscale hosting to run an on-demand application. Can we create, save and start a custom Windows 2003 server image via API? How quickly the custom image boots (assume it is of 10GB size)?
3. Is it possible to increase or decrease memory consumption dynamically without restarting a server?

[jeisenbe]

Hi there Vlad, thanks for posting :)

1. As I understand, Windows (XP, SBS, 2003) instances are rented from Microsoft by your company. I just pay to Flexiscale for servers according to your terms and you pay Microsoft licensing fees. Is it true? If yes, do you plan to provide Windows images with Microsoft SQL Server installed under similar terms?

The Windows Server licensing fees are included in the hourly rate in proportion to the actual monthly fees charged. As SQL server does not lend itself readily to the burstability functions available under the Flexiscale platform, this product is 'sold' separately. You would pay a standard monthly fee for the SQL Server software on top of the hourly charge for the server. For this reason, we do not plan on providing Windows Images with SQL preinstalled.

2. Our company considering Flexiscale hosting to run an on-demand application. Can we create, save and start a custom Windows 2003 server image via API? How quickly the custom image boots (assume it is of 10GB size)?

This functionality will be available via API from mid-March 2008 and is something we are actively working on. The boot time for the custom image depends on how it is configured. For reference, the average boot time for the individual 'clean' images is <1 minute.

3. Is it possible to increase or decrease memory consumption dynamically without restarting a server?

Simple answer is no - This is an operating system limitation which has nothing to do with our platform. However, you can change the memory in FlexiScale and then schedule the restart at a later, more convenient time.

I hope this answers your questions fully. If not, I will do my best to clarify.

Take care,
Jonathan.

[BSolomon]

This functionality will be available via API from mid-March 2008 and is something we are actively working on. The boot time for the custom image depends on how it is configured. For reference, the average boot time for the individual 'clean' images is <1 minute.

Hi,
I was wondering what is the status of this, as looking at the API I did not see any way of adding a custom image to use for servers.

[jeisenbe]

Hi there BSolomon,

While this functionality is still being worked on, this is something that we can only provide in a manual fashion at the moment. As this is a manual process, there will be a delay before the server image is provided under your account.

The closest you can come to your requested functionality at the moment is having an install script to pull data onto newly created servers from a control server.

Watch this space for further announcements relating to the requested functionality.

regards,
Jonathan.

[dave.linsley]

... this is something that we can only provide in a manual fashion at the moment. As this is a manual process, there will be a delay before the server image is provided under your account.....


Can you provide any further details on this 'manual' process please?

[tonylucas]

Dave,

Apologies for this post getting missed.

Basically at the moment you need to drop an e-mail through the control panel and they will then setup the image for you.

This will be automated in the future.

Regards,

Tony.