IT Support: A primer on Virtual Servers

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We were asked to give a brief overview of virtual servers and their benefits today. Just though we’d share it here.

Here are the Benefits:

First of all with the latest hardware a virtual server runs with almost as well in a virtual environment as if it were installed directly.

Ease of provisioning

If you have a handful of virtual computers and you need to create another server. It is much easier and quick to setup a new virtual in your farm than to order a new server and wait for it then finally set it up. You can even just have a master image that you use to spin up the server and go from there.

Optimization

Traditionally if you have several servers they will all be sitting around running at 10-30% utilization.

When you provision a virtual server you can give it as much memory, storage, and processors as you have available. This allows you to provision more servers with less waste.

Resources are shared. When you configure a server for 6GB of RAM you are saying this server can use a maximum of 6GB of ram. When it isn’t using that much the rest is available to the other servers. So you can over provision if you know your virtual servers peak at different times, like a night time processing application vs a daytime support application.

Back up and Disaster Recovery

Traditionally even if you image a server you have to worry about installing the image on dissimilar hardware if you have to restore it. This can be a mess with most operating systems. Costing both time and money. With a virtual server you know regardless of the hardware you restore the image to it will work right away.

In a virtual environment you have many options. If the server is critical than you can setup High Availability with another virtual server. This means that a perfect copy of your server is running on two virtual servers. If there is a hardware failure on the primary the secondary takes over without missing a beat.

In larger organizations you can further abstract storage to SAN devices this will let you attach your physical server to a central repository for virtual servers to be built from.

Testing and Development

Want to roll out that new update or install that new software. You can use things called snapshots to test a change and then if you don’t like it just roll the snapshot back. If you do like it then you can carry on.

Also if you just want to try something out like a new solution then it’s less painful if you didn’t need to buy additional hardware for that.

Isolation and security

You really don’t want your payroll systems to be on the same machine as your web server and development environments, even if all 3 could run on one old PC.  You also want to be able to separate workloads so they don’t interfere with each other and compete for resources.

For years the practice had become 1 server per task – even if the task was “run a printer”

This led to 100s and 100s of barely utilized servers, eating power, and producing heat in your server room. Each one with a multi-gigabyte disk that is spinning waiting to fail, (maybe multiples if you need raid), and a UPS, and mostly idle memory, and more power supplies, fibre channel cards, and NICs, and ports on the switch… all mostly unused. All waiting to break and cause an outage or a service call, or a visit to the server room at 2AM.

 To sum up

So what virtualization does, is it allows you to have the best of both worlds. You put that money you were spending on buying new low-end servers every few months into a big pool, and buy a few really server grade pieces of hardware while still preserving the separation of duties.

So now you have 5 physical instances of low problem hardware to maintain instead of 250 poor ones, and 5% the power bill, and 5% of the cooling bill, and all the extras you get from virtualization like abstraction, VM migration, snapshots, quick provisioning, and other goodies.

To learn more about the IT Support Services we provide, please don’t hesitate to contact us.