‘Legacy’ indicates that the VM is hosted on our old virtualisation platform, which was our virtual machine offering prior to our Cloud Servers. These machines can normally be identified by the hostname, which will be of the form: stoneboat.vm.bytemark.co.uk
This service will continue to run as long as there are still customers using it, but it has been officially deprecated and no requests for new machines will be accepted. If you require virtual machine hosting, you should look at our Cloud Servers instead.
What’s a host machine?
We run all our customers’ Legacy Virtual Machines (which we call ‘legacy VMs’) on top of a set of physical host machines (which we call ‘hosts’). Because virtual machines are simply programs themselves, they can be backed up and migrated to a secondary host machine. If a host machine fails for more than a few hours, we can bring up the affected customers’ legacy VMs on a secondary host while we fix the primary host.
What’s the console shell?
The console shell is a program running on the host machine which allows you external control over your legacy VM, and allows a level of control over your machine that colocation providers usually charge extra for. Through the console shell you can:
- halt or reboot your machine, even if the kernel has crashed.
- upgrade your Linux kernel to newer versions as they become available.
- access system or boot consoles.
For more information on the console please click here.