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With server virtualization, you can consolidate workloads of underutilized server machines onto a smaller number of fully utilized machines. Fewer physical machines can lead to reduced costs through lower hardware, energy, and management overhead, plus the creation of a more dynamic IT infrastructure.
The fundamental use of virtualization is to help consolidate many servers on a single system while maintaining isolation helps address these demands. One of the main benefits of server consolidation is a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), not just from lowering hardware requirements but also from lower power, cooling, and management costs.
Four Reasons Organizations Utilize Virtualization
Fault isolation: An application error, operating system crash, or user error in one virtual machine will not affect the use of other virtual machines on the same system making disaster recovery simpler.
Increased security: By separating users and applications into different virtual machines to create a virtual infrastructure, diverse user communities (and, in hosting environments, even multiple customers) can use the resources of a single physical system securely, with their information and network traffic safely isolated from others.
Rapid provisioning: Because a virtual machine’s disk storage is usually represented as files or logical volumes, standard storage management techniques such as file copy or volume cloning can be used to create new virtual machines rapidly, rather than requiring real “bare metal” installation of operating systems and applications, as non-virtual use of separate physical servers would require. This server consolidation can cut the time to set up a new system (including hardware acquisition and racking, software installation and configuration) from weeks to minutes.
Portability: The use of abstract devices within virtual machines, combined with the encapsulation of virtual data in file-backed or volume-backed virtual disks, makes it easy to move virtual machines from one physical system to another, for maintenance, more effective resource utilization, or simply for replicated provisioning. In many cases, running virtual machines can even be moved while they are online, with no interruption to service.
What is Hyper-V?
Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, the next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology, allows you to make the best use of your server hardware investments by consolidating multiple server roles as separate virtual machines (VMs) running on a single physical machine. With Hyper-V, you can also efficiently run multiple different operating systems—Windows, Linux, and others—in parallel, on a single server, and fully leverage the power of x64 computing.
What is Xen?
Xen is an open source technology installing a thin software layer (known as the Xen hypervisor) directly on the hardware, or “bare metal,” and is thereby inserted between the server’s hardware and the operating system. This provides an abstraction layer that allows each physical server to run one or more “virtual servers,” effectively decoupling the operating system and its applications from the underlying physical server. The Xen hypervisor is exceptionally lean - less than 50,000 lines of code – which translates to extremely low overhead and near-native performance for guests.
What is VMware ESXi?
VMware ESXi is a hypervisor that partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines. VMware ESXi is an OS-independent hypervisor with a thin 32 MB footprint and supports various 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows, Linux, Solaris and Netware., in addition to 64-bit hardware. VMware ESXi’s bare-metal architecture and advanced memory and network features allow you to run even the most resource-intensive workloads such as email, databases, and ERP applications.
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery
Business Continuity is the ability to minimize both scheduled and unscheduled downtime. That includes time lost to routine functions, such as maintenance and backup, as well as unanticipated outages. Hyper-V includes powerful business continuity features, such as live backup and quick migration, enabling businesses to meet stringent uptime and response metrics.
Disaster Recovery is a key component of business continuity. Natural disasters, malicious attacks, and even simple configuration problems like software conflicts can cripple services and applications until administrators resolve the problems and restore any backed up data. Leveraging the clustering capabilities of Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V now provides support for Disaster Recovery (DR) within IT environments and across data centers, using geographically dispersed clustering capabilities. Rapid and reliable disaster and business recovery helps ensure minimal data loss and powerful remote management capabilities.
Traditional Disaster Recovery solutions are costly and complex, and often can’t meet your recovery objectives even after doubling your hardware (and cost) for protected applications. Imagine being able to recover to any machine, not just specific duplicate hardware. Hardware-independence in your data center where any physical server can be the recovery target for your virtual servers, makes fast recovery the norm. Reduce your hardware costs and your maintenance budget. Even if you haven’t virtualized your production servers, virtualized target servers for your Disaster Recovery give you greater simplicity, reliability, and cost savings.
- Recover from disasters rapidly
- Ensure reliable disaster recovery
- Reduce the cost of disaster recovery
- Automate disaster recovery
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