Hi,
currently I am running some virtual root servers in different setups, mostly apache, postfix, courier and some extra services (bind/dnssec, owncloud, openvpn, munin, nagios, ossec) on a hand full of machines. Partly for myself, partly for customers - everything is currently hand-administrated.
Now I'm starting to look into saltstack for configuration management, and I am thinking about getting myself a physical box in a datacenter - and in the same though I would like to get myself a bit into virtualisation.
Primarily, I want to move the services I am using privately and start virtualizing those, to give myself a bit more space for experimentation. Build myself a load balancer, database replication, backup, separate services to different machines, all that stuff.
So in the end, I would not have much more than 10 virtual machines with a very low footprint (as my page does not get more than 10 visitors a day, 20 emails a day or something... LOW!), so any kind of virtualisation would suffice for that.
But my question is: what makes sense to learn? Something like OpenStack would likely be absolutely overkill, but something like hand-managed Virtualbox would not make sense to me from a learning startpoint. I would like to get into something that I can start very low, one host but that will at one point prove useful if I have to dig deeper into virtualisation from a DevOps or even Sysadmin perspective.
I've seen Vagrant, which seems cool for quick spinup of a VM, but I don't think that it is intended to be run in a hosting setup.
Also, I've seen FOSS-Cloud, but I'm not sure if that could even be run single-server.
What is out there? What can you recommend me?
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