Virtual Revolution

I'll explain briefly what so called virtualization and green technology is. Let's suppose that in your company you have server for each major server role. So, you run one server as a domain controller, one as a file server, one as a print server, one as e-mail server and so on. And your 10 servers are older models of some hardware vendor with old school power supplies that sucks out lot of power from electric grid and your electric bill. Also consider factor of redundancy, you need to run all these RAID-1, RAID-5 on the same server, duplicating hard drives. Hardware maintenance cost for your servers is huge and it never ends.

But there is better solution, one that we IT administrators dreamed of and you as company, it's called Virtualization. What is virtualization? Well it's a way of running multiple "virtual servers" within one physical server. How's that possible?. Combining technologies from hardware and software vendors, for example Dell and Microsoft, you can harness this power to fit your need and budget. So instead of buying 10 servers for each role, you'll buy one very powerful server and we load all these VM's (Virtual Machines) on that server and different roles we need.

Why is this better and more efficient? Well figure it out on your own, but I'll tell you my opinion. First of all I want to get rid of that sound, that buzz that comes from 10 servers, second of all I have one baby to take care of, not 10, so if it's needs help it's easy, replace a hard drive, add more memory, or fix power supply. But I know what I'll do, I'll put redundant power supply, and RAID so my system never goes down, and with today's hot-plug technology you don't even have to turn the server off, just take the bad hard drive and put the new one back in, and all data replicates in matter of minutes or hours depending how much data you have. Actually I know even better solution, I'll buy one more server that is exactly the same and then just keep it as a physical clone.

Now to the backup procedures. Virtual Machines are image files. What is image file? Image file is your server compressed into one file. Wow, I know. So imagine your regular server goes down, domain controller, or e-mail server and now you're on the quest of restoring those data using all these procedures, frustrating and time consuming. And even worse you do windows update and server crashes, because some patch is not compatible with your sofware causing your network to go down. Not anymore, all you need to do is to take a snapshot, snapshot is image of system state that is saved in memory of the computer that you can revert back if you need it. So, before updates you take a snapshot, then you do updates, and now you find out that your server is not working in compliance with some new update, so all you do, you go back in time and revert, and now you're back on track, and do your homework and reserach why this happened.

Second thing is backup of entire image. With Microsoft Shadow Copy technologies you can backup these VM's while they're running and in case of a failure of the VM all you need to do is to boot up this VM on some other Hyper-V server. Hyper-V, now what is that? Well Hyper-V is a Microsoft Virtualization Technology, and I know there is a VMware as well, but they're pretty much the same to me, and I use them both, as they're good for different configurations.

Now I can drag this all they long, so please to find out more go to http://www.microsoft.com/hyper-v-server/en/us/default.aspx or http://www.vmware.com/virtualization/.

At the end, if you need specialist call us today and we'll help you out to setup your Virtual and Green Environment so you'll help us build a better planet.

Author:
Vlastimir Sindelic
Principal Consultant and Senior Systems Engineer
Secure Networks ITC