That's the exact phrase from my ticket. "Full virtualization" in the panel, customer reads it as "nested virt allowed," node catches fire, everyone surprised.
If your provider's Terms don't explicitly list nested KVM, assume it's banned. Even if it works today, it's a bug not a feature.
I measure Contabo Mumbai from my apartment. 35ms to their Mumbai DC. Not bad sir.
But their ARM stock always out of stock. I check every week. You must grab fast when available sir.
Member
IP pricing. Now there's a thing. Contabo charges per additional IP, yes? Most do. But some of these ARM boxes come with IPv6 only and you pay extra for v4.
Raj, your clients need v4 for Android emulators? Play Store, Google login, that whole mess?
Member OP
Good catch. Yes, most client apps still break on v6-only. Need v4 for the emulator instances.
Contabo's v4 add-on was EUR 2/month last I saw. Kills the margin on a EUR 6 plan.
Why are we talking about 4GB. I run Android emulator on 128GB Threadripper with 32 cores. Anything less is pain.
ARM is cheap because it's slow. Your clients will notice.
Member
Not the new Neoverse cores. I have Ampere Altra in lab, single thread is fine for emulator. Problem is memory bandwidth, not CPU.
4GB is tight though. Android Studio alone wants 3GB. Emulator with Play Store needs another 2-3. Swap on NVMe is mandatory.
Member
What swap configuration you using? I test zram vs zswap vs plain swapfile. For ARM VPS, zram with lz4 seems best ratio.
Still, my premium infrastructure uses dedicated memory. No swap. Premium clients expect this.
Member
Zram yes, but not for emulator workloads. The compression overhead on JIT-compiled code is noticeable. Plain swapfile on local NVMe, swappiness 10, that's my setup.
Your "premium infrastructure" -- what hardware? You never say. Ampere? AWS Graviton? Or just KVM on whatever?
Member OP
This drifted exactly where I needed it to. Thanks all.
Summary for anyone finding this later:
- Contabo ARM VPS exists, cheap, often out of stock, v4 IP extra
- Nested virt on VPS: probably not, check ToS
- Bare metal ARM: works but not resell-friendly
- 4GB is minimum, plan for swap
- Skip the Telegram bot with no company name
Still looking for a provider with actual nested virt on ARM VPS if anyone finds one. Will update if I do.
