My site was running slow, and seemed to be getting slower with time. All this time I assumed that even though a VPS is a virtual environment, it seemed logical that HMS would do the usual disk maintainence for us. WRONG!!!! Just for my own amusement I was poking around the
Programs > Accessories > System tools.
I went to defrag, and ran analyze. I have never seen so much red in my life. my C drive was 67% fragmented!!! I am running defrag now. This will surely make a huge increase in performance. HMS needs a section reminding us what we are responsible for on our VPS, as I think many of us just think a VPS is a glorified shared hosting account with more power and control.

Whitesites, I'm sorry you were under this impression. Our VPS packages are self managed solutions. We handle software upgrades and regular systems administration at the hardware node level.

Everything passed that is up to you the sys. admin. Normally for customers who are not familiar with administering an entire server we would direct them to sales to setup a managed dedicated server, which is maintained in exactly the same way a shared server is, except it's all yours.

VPS == Double Edged Sword; more power means more responsibility. But isn't that how it always goes?

Oh BTW http://www.hostmysite.com/support/vps/windows/performancetips/ if you didn't know it existed (I didn't)

ARE YOU KIDDING ME???? I've had my vps a year and a half and i NEVER knew about this?!?

What is an application template? Where can you get them? I always wondered how Win2003 only took up 150mb of space.

I wasn't aware of this one either! When was this KB article published?

This defrag thing is odd. I was doing since last February and noticed some Virtuozzo related files never get defragmented. Couple of months ago i had ask to customer services the reason of it and i had been told no need to do it as defragmentation is done by node level.

So what is an application template?

An application template is a piece of software that is stored on the node and copied to your VE when mounted.

I'm not sure exactly how it works (SWSoft doesn't seem to have anything detailed in the knowledge base), but since the node is actually housing all this data your VPS is free to use it's alloted space free of the burden this additional software would normally incur.

This is the same reason why making serious changes to the Windows directory is foolish on a VPS, and the whole SWAP space issue. All the VPS servers reload their configuration when they're remounted, unfortunately I'm not sure on the specifics of what is and isn't copied sorry.

And I believe you should be able to install Application Templates through your customer control panel (If they are available on your node).

http://download.openvz.org/doc/OpenVZ-Users-Guide.pdf

A template is basically a set of packages from some Linux distribution used to populate a VPS. An OS template consists of system programs, libraries, and scripts needed to boot up and run the system (VPS), as well as some very basic applications and utilities. Applications like a compiler and an SQL server are usually not included into an OS template.

A template cache is an OS template installed into a VPS and then packed into a gzipped tar archive. This allows to greatly sped up the creation of a new Virtual Private Server: instead of installing all the packages comprising a Linux distribution, vzctl just unpacks the archive.
Template metadata are a set of files containing the information needed to recreate the template cache. It contains the following information:

* List of packages this template comprises
* Locations of (network) package repositories
* Scripts needed to be executed on various stages of template installation
* Public GPG key(s) needed to check signatures of packages
* Additional OpenVZ-specific packages

I'm curious why no one posted creating a scheduled task to handle your drive defrags?

Pretty easy to do and one less thing to "remember"...

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/tips/gehrke1.mspx

I set up a task for each drive 4,5,6am

For Windows, the most efficient defrag solution is an automatic defrag. You don't have to worry about remembering to run a defrag or scheduling one for periods when low activity is expected. Instead the defragger can run in the background (consumes barely any resources) and defrag as necessary, automatically, when the system has enough idle resources. IMO, it's the most convenient and time/manpower efficient solution when large numbers of machines have to be administered and maintained.