General pre-sales questions :)

<i>I have a few more questions please.
If I install now the Virtualmin let's say in a CentOS box, am I going to be able to move/transfer the whole settings in a 6 months period to a new debian server assuming that Debian support will be in place.</i>

Yes. You may install on any operating system that is supported. The installation script selects all of the right packages and actions based on the detected OS. Debian will be supported within the month, I expect.

Most settings are also easy to transfer, as the templates are identical across all platforms. If you modify the module configuration itself, those changes might need to be manually brought over--but the number of changes will almost certainly be few (possibly even none).

Domains can be moved between platforms with no trouble, as far as I know...though this is not exceedingly well tested. Currently, we're only supporting the Red Hat based systems, and they all look alike--so my tests are inconclusive. But we will be doing more testing of cross-platform backup/restores in the near future.

<i>I am trying to avoid moving to another commercial system as webmin/virtualmin in my opinion has the best approach as it doesn't touch/compile it's own things (apart from just a few)...</i>

You're not the only one. This was the single biggest complaint about our competition. So, I'm spending vast amounts of time making sure it is not an issue with Virtualmin Professional. I've since learned to regret this decision (yast is trying to kill me), but I'm gonna stick by it, and provide OS-native packages for everything that we provide. We're also going to work within the existing update framework (if such a framework exists), so on Debian we'll provide an apt repo and on Fedora we provide a yum repo and on FreeBSD we'll provide ports.

<i>Also another critical point from the business point of view is support. Let's say that I am getting 20 new servers and install Virtualmin. Then one day, there is a serious bug which affect the company and its customers. How fast and afficient the support will be? Ofcourse it will be a paid job. How many developers are currently working on virtualmin and will be able to offer such a level of support (1-2 hours responce)?</i>

We're doing pretty well so far. 1-2 hours might be a bit tight, but it's not far off of reality--you may wish to browse our resolved and closed bugs to see how long things took to shake out. It's nearly always fixed within a few hours. Serious issues get extremely quick attention (see the installer issues that Faisal ran into in this thread: https://www.virtualmin.com/forums/message-view?message%5fid=10352 ). And, of course, keep in mind that we are in the Early Adopter period--we are releasing early and often, bugs and all, because we want to get the product into a few real users hands. Once the EA period is over, things will be a bit more calm and everything will be pretty heavily tested before we subject our customers to it. Because of our Open Source heritage, users want to be involved in the process of development, and we want the users to be involved. It makes for much better software, though it can also make for long days and late nights for the developers.

Another data point is the Webmin users mailing list...Jamie is frightfully fast at responding to issues, and has been for the entire 8 years he's been developing Webmin (ask anyone who's been there for a while). You won't find more rapid response in the Open Source or proprietary world than what Jamie has provided for all that time. We understand if you don't know us well enough to trust us. We'll be here in 3 or 6 or 12 months, after you've had more of a chance to see how we operate.

As for how many developers, two. Me and Jamie. But after conversion there's seven of us. Jamie is conservatively worth any six other developers. If you doubt it, you just don't know Jamie. ;-)

There's more going on behind the scenes than I'm talking about, and there will be more people at Virtualmin, Inc. in the future. But if you expect you can get better support from one of the big guys, I won't discourage you from waiting until we're one of the big guys too. It won't be long.

Hope this helps.

<i>This is why I am thinking to drop most of my other commercial control panels and move to Virtualmin but at the moment I can't as it lucks some features that I really need and cannot move away without it.</i>

What specifically do you need? If there's something that one of our proprietary competitors can do that we can't, we'd like to know about it. We're pretty aggressively targeting feature parity with all major virtual hosting administration systems for the first stable release in a month or two. We've already topped cPanel on all but a few things, and Plesk isn't even in the running (though it has a couple of extra optional products that we don't have anything to address yet, and many folks like its simplicity so we're aware of its strengths). I know you mentioned remote capabilities, but I wasn't aware that any of our competitors had us beat in any significant way there--do any of them allow arbitrary services (other than DNS) on other servers? If you've got a specific example of what you're doing, and with what product, I'll create a wish ticket in the bug tracker and Jamie will make it magically appear in no time. ;-)

I didn't mention it earlier, as I didn't think it was what you were after, but it's worth noting that all of the command line tools I mentioned in the earlier post can also be called remotely via HTTP:

https://www.virtualmin.com/support/documentation/virtualmin-remote/

But, still, if you need separation of services across servers we just aren't there yet. But I would be curious to know who else supports this kind of capability?

<i>However, I will buy it in the next hours just to support your work.</i>

Much appreciated, but even more valuable is your feedback on how we can make Virtualmin Professional better than any other tool available. We'll be happy to take your money when we provide the best tool for your needs--and it won't be long, I'm sure. ;-)

<i>Is there any disater recovery tool?
Let's say that the main disk goes down and I have on a remote server just the tar backups.

Is there an easy way to restore everything (virtualmin confs, DB, home files etc) quickly?</i>

The Virtualmin backup tool should do this without anything special. If it doesn't, it's a bug. i.e., you should be able to restore a Virtualmin instance from one stock Virtualmin Professional install to another stock Virtualmin Professional with only the backup of the virtual server instance--assuming you've selected a full backup, it will include mail spools, all home directories, sub-domains, databases, virtual server details (quotas, privileges, httpd configuration, Webmin account, etc.). The goal of the backups is to virtualize out the domains so they can be easily moved to new servers, restored in the event of hardware troubles, or tried out on a new OS (some things might not move to a whole new OS without minor modification, such as Script Installer script configurations, but this is unavoidable).

It is also wise, of course to make use of the System Backup and/or Configuration File backup tools to make recovery of the system itself easier, since you're probably going to make a few changes here and there to the system somewhere along the way. It just depends on how much change you make as to whether you want only the configuration files or the whole system. If you have a very (strictly) standardized automated system installation that applies to all systems on your network, then you can probably safely just back up the configuration files and the Virtualmin domains.

I would, of course, suggest an occasional test of the backup/restore policy to be sure you're catching everything you need to get back up and running quickly--but the tools you need are all there in Virtualmin and Webmin. We'll be doing a lot of cross-platform migration and backup/restore testing here in the next few weeks, as we prepare for the first official release, but I don't expect major problems.

As for installation in a vmware instance: Yes. In fact, nearly all of my testing goes on in either Xen virtual hosts or QEmu virtual hosts. I plan to try out vmware to see if it handles the non-Xen-able (or at least not easily Xen-able) systems faster the QEmu, and if so I'll be switching. You definitely have to have a fully qualified hostname on the system, but it doesn't have to have real DNS for the installer to work (services won't work for outside users without it being able to modify the DNS server that is authoritative for your domains, but I'm sure you're well aware of that and know how to modify your hosts file to test around it).