Regional University Computing Center Kaiserslautern-Landau
Illustation virtual machines

Virtual Machines

A service of RHRZ is the operation of virtual machines under VMware ESX / vSphere. This service is only available to employees of the TU. You will receive an "empty" VM, which you install yourself. The operator of the VM is responsible for the correct licensing of the operating system and application software.

Costs

As of 1.1.2019 the following prices for VMs apply:

  •     2.90 EUR per vCPU and month (maximum 4 vCPUs)
  •     0.35 EUR per GB vRAM and month (max. 48 GB)
  •     2.50 EUR per 100 GB vDisk and month (max. 300 GB)
  •     Virtual disk capacity over 300 GB cannot be booked.
  •     Chargeable VMs are operated in a high-performance area of the ESX environment with controlled overbooking.
  •     Free VMs with 1vCPU, 4 GB RAM and 60 GB vDisk are operated in a standard area of the ESX environment. There is no guaranteed performance for VMs here.

Important information for VM operators

  • Only employees at RPTU are allowed to operate VMs on our VMWare virtualization. The operator of the VM must ensure that the operating system and the programs installed in the VM are correctly licensed .
  • The VMWare tools must be installed, the IO timeouts must be set accordingly and the Linux-specific optimizations must be carried out. If the hard disk of the VM is defective after a hardware error/failure of a host, storage system or network, no support can be provided without installed tools. Install/configure VMware tools
  • VMWare snapshots
    • Never use your own snapshots as a backup
    • Each snapshot makes a VM slower
    • Never leave a single snapshot on a VM for longer than 72 hours
  • Although the VMs are backed up by us at regular intervals, the VM operator is responsible for backing up important data.
  • The administrator team reserves the right to shut down the VM "manually" and restart it on another host if the VM is not moved automatically, e.g. if the ESX has to be put into maintenance mode. Without VMWare tools, the VM is switched off and cannot be shut down in a controlled manner.
  • Further information on provisioning and monitoring can be obtained from Mr. Henri Schmidt, Room 34/309, Tel. 3866 or from the RZ Service Center.