subject: How Virtual Servers Make Businesses Work Better [print this page] How Virtual Servers Make Businesses Work Better
If your business is looking at the options available for a business server, it makes sense to choose a virtual server as your best solution.
Before virtualisation, IT would run one application per physical server. For example, your typical business IT setup would involve a single machine that acted as a mail server, one for central file storage, another machine that runs your sales software etc. For small businesses, this was not very cost effective, especially when things went wrong and needed fixing or parts needed replacing.
Now with virtualisation, you can take a single server, partition it up and run multiple "virtual" servers on it by using special virtual server software. All the resources of the server can be allocated to each specific task that would normally need a whole server's resources to run each of them.
Virtualisation is possible because of advances in both hardware and software capabilities. While 64-bit computer processors have been around for some years now, it's taken a bit longer for the software to catch up. Now that server hardware is so much more powerful than before and there is software available like VMware and Hyper-V that manages the virtualised server processes and takes full advantage of recent advances in 64-bit hardware technology.
How Server Virtualisation Helps Your Business
1. Consolidate your resources by breaking the "one server per application" model that is inherent with legacy IT infrastructure.
2. Save money on data centre costs by reducing the amount of physical infrastructure needed to meet your IT requirements. By having fewer servers you not only save money on hardware, you also save on the cost of space, power and cooling requirements.
3. Easily make secure backups your server in real time by taking snapshots of the system. You can also recover your backups immediately from unplanned problems. Because virtual machines are hardware independent, your backups can be rapidly deployed on new hardware without that hardware needing to be identical.
4. Eliminate scheduled downtime from maintenance and development. If any development or maintenance needs to be done within your virtual server environment, you can easily make a copy and work from it without affecting the live server's availability.
5. Dynamic resource management. You can dynamically allocate memory, CPU speed, hard drive space etc to each server application as needed without downtime. Indeed, additional resources can even be allocated automatically. For example, if a database grows beyond the hard disk space originally allocated to the virtual server it sits on, additional space can automatically be allocated to ensure that performance is not compromised.
6. Enjoy the security and services offered by a dedicated server with increased control.
7. Virtualisation allows for automatic management wherein the capacity gets added automatically if the database has no provision for space anymore.
Bare Metal Virtualisation vs Hosted Solution
There are two common approaches to server virtualisation: "hosted" and "bare metal". Hosted virtualisation runs as an application under a computer operating system. Bare-metal virtualisation interfaces directly with computer hardware, without needing an operating system.
Bare-metal virtualisation has several advantages over hosted solutions, such as better security because it has a smaller "attack surface", meaning that there is less actual code to exploit than a general purpose operating system. A bare-metal system is also specifically design for server virtualisation, unlike a general computer operating system and has no need to pass or share user information between virtual machines and a host, like clipboards and shared folders. This is because a bare-metal system runs on independent partitions that don't need to share data with each other.
The good news is that both technologies vmware and hyper-v have free editions of their products that can be used by SMEs.
