Introduction of Server Virtualization
The adoption of virtualization in the enterprise has increased flexibility in deployment and life cycle management of applications. IT professionals deploy and use virtualization to consolidate workloads and reduce server sprawl. Additionally, they deploy virtualization with clustering technologies to provide a robust IT infrastructure with high availability and quick disaster recovery. Even so, customers are looking for more flexibility.
How Can Server Virtualization meet your needs?
Server Virtualization provides a dynamic, reliable, and scalable virtualization platform combined with a single set of integrated management tools to manage both physical and virtual resources, enabling you to create an agile and dynamic data center. Server Virtualization enables:
Server Consolidation
Businesses are under pressure to ease management and reduce costs while retaining and enhancing competitive advantages, such as flexibility, reliability, scalability, and security. The fundamental use of virtualization 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.
Businesses also benefit from server virtualization through infrastructure optimization, both from an asset utilization standpoint as well as the ability to balance workloads across different resources. Improved flexibility of the overall environment and the ability to freely integrate 32-bit and 64-bit workloads in the same environment is another benefit.
Business Continuity and 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.
Testing and Development
Testing and development are frequently the first business functions to take advantage of virtualization technology. Using virtual machines, development staffs can create and test a wide variety of scenarios in a safe, self-contained environment that accurately approximates the operation of physical servers and clients. Hyper-V maximizes utilization of test hardware which can help reduce costs, improve life cycle management, and improve test coverage. With extensive guest OS support and checkpoint features, Hyper-V provides a great platform for your test and development environments.
Dynamic Data Center
Hyper-V, together with your existing system management solutions, such as Microsoft System Center, can help you realize the dynamic data center vision of providing self-managing dynamic systems and operational agility. With features like automated virtual machine reconfiguration, flexible resource control, and quick migration, you can create a dynamic IT environment that uses virtualization to not only respond to problems, but also to anticipate increased demands.
Key Features of Server Virtualization
Server Virtualization takes better advantage of physical computer hardware with greater processor support and deeper support for physical computer hardware. Key Features include:
- Live Migration
- Increased Hardware Support for Hyper-V Virtual Machines
- Cluster Shared Volumes
- Improved Cluster Node Connectivity Fault Tolerance
- Enhanced Cluster Validation Tool
- Improved Management of Virtual Data Centers
- Improved Virtual Networking Performance
- Increased Performance & Reduce Power Consumption
- Enhanced Networking Support
- Dynamic VM storage
- Broad OS Support
- Network Load Balancing
- New Hardware Sharing Architecture
- Virtual Machine Snapshot
- Extensible
Microsoft Hyper-V Server
Microsoft Hyper-V Server is a stand-alone product that provides a simplified, reliable, cost-effective, and optimized virtualization solution enabling organizations to improve server utilization and reduce costs. It allows organizations to consolidate workloads onto a single physical server and is a good solution for organizations that want a basic and simplified virtualization solution for consolidating servers as well as for development and test environments.
Low utilization infrastructure workloads, departmental applications, and simple branch office workloads are also candidates to virtualize using Hyper-V Server.
To learn more, please visit the Microsoft Hyper-V Server Web site
System Center Virtual Machine Manager
System Center Virtual Machine Manager is a comprehensive heterogeneous management solution for the virtualized data center. Virtual Machine Manager enables increased physical server utilization, centralized management of virtual machine infrastructure, and rapid provisioning of new virtual machines by the administrator and authorized end users. Virtual Machine Manager provides the best solution for leveraging existing IT administrative skills and processes for managing the virtual and physical environment.
To learn more, please visit the System Center Virtual Machine Manager Web site