Australia’s first IPv6 enabled VPSs are here

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As of June 2011, I am no longer employed by AussieHQ. This post is for reference only.

Nearly one month ago AussieHQ subsidiary Jumba launched Virtual Private Servers.

When you typically think of Virtual Private Servers, you might think of a standard rack mount server running a hypervisor like Xen with 8-16GB of RAM and some large SATA drives.

While these solutions might sound fine, wait until there is a hardware failure of some description. When there is a hardware failure all of the virtual environments that exist on that server will be offline until the failure has been rectified.

This is why we have spent a significant amount of resources building a service offering where such a scenario is not possible.

The AussieHQ and Jumba virtual environments are built on a fully redundant IBM Blade Center cluster running VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.

What this means is that you won’t be subject to lengthy downtime if a component fails. In the unlikely event that a blade completely fails, the only downtime you will experience is the length of time it takes for your environment to boot up on another blade.

In addition to this, VMware VI3 also has a feature known as “VMotion”. If we need to take a blade offline for maintenance, all the environments are seamlessly moved to another blade with no downtime.

The “VMotion” feature is also used in conjunction with another feature called “DRS”. In single box solutions, if a task needs more resources than are available to them at any given time then the task will not be successful. With our clustered environment, that customer can seamlessly and automatically be moved to another blade where those resources are available.

These are just some of the features that differentiate the Jumba product offering from others in the market, however I am pleased to announce one feature:

All environments have native IPv6 connectivity (/64 range) by default.

We’ve done our bit by providing IPv6 connectivity to dedicated environments at an unbeatable cost. While we continue working on rolling out IPv6 to our shared customer base, you can begin deploying IPv6 enabled content and services on your VPS today!

On a related note, as we continue our experimentation, here are some recent facts about shaun.net:

  • First IPv6 enabled web site on the AussieHQ network
  • First site running on our new VMware cluster
  • First production site running off a Plesk 9 release server on our network.