Virtualisation

Introduction

The pull of virtualisation is strong—the economics are too attractive to resist. And for most organisations, there’s no reason to fight against this pull. Well-managed virtualisation technologies can make their world better.

Virtualisation is one of the hottest trends in information technology today. This is no accident. While a variety of technologies fall under the virtualisation umbrella, all of them are changing the IT world in significant ways.

Server virtualisation creates a separate operating system environment that is logically detached from the host server. This enables organisations to increase server utilisation rates, allow applications to leverage a greater density of computing resources, and facilitate benefits such as high availability and disaster recovery.

Hardware virtualisation is a mainstream technology today. Microsoft’s decision to make it a fundamental part of Windows only underscores its importance.

By implementing the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008, you will already have the tools you need to virtualise your server infrastructure and take advantage of savings from Virtualisation.

To discuss Windows Server Virtualisaton and your specific requirements in more detail, call us on 0141 244 0069.

Key Benefits of Virtualisation

Support the same workload on less hardware by consoliating servers

• Benefit from lower equipment costs and lower electrical consumption
• Reduce physical space required for hardware
• Help the environment – this is a very green technology!
• Ensure high availability of services when they are needed
• Enhance business continuity by simplifying back up and disaster recovery
• Use only one set of management tools to manage physical & virtual servers
• Migrate workloads automatically without disrupting users
• Empower the IT Team to focus resources on higher-value, strategic initiatives
• Support legacy systems by easily re-hosting them
• Improve security around sensitive information
• Reduce application compatibility testing by removing conflicts
• Windows Server 2008 can run all your Web applications, whether they require ASP (Active Server Page) technology, ASP or .NET.

Microsoft Hyper-V

The fundamental problem in hardware virtualisation is to create virtual machines in software. The most efficient way to do this is to rely on a thin layer of software known as a hypervisor running directly on the hardware. Hyper-V, part of Windows Server 2008, is Microsoft’s hypervisor. Each VM Hyper-V is completely isolated from its fellows, running its own guest operating system. This lets the workload on each one execute as if it were running on its own physical server. The schematic below shows how this looks.

Other aspects of Hyper-V are also designed for high performance. Hyper-V allows assigning multiple CPUs to a single VM, for example, and it is a native 64-bit technology. (In fact, Hyper-V is part of all three 64-bit editions of Windows Server 2008—Standard, Enterprise, and Data Centre—but it is not available for 32-bit editions.) The large physical memory space this allows is useful when many virtual machines must run on a single physical server. Hyper-V also allows the VMs it supports to have up to 64 gigabytes of memory per virtual machine. And while Hyper-V itself is a 64-bit technology, it supports both 32-bit and 64- bit VMs. VMs of both types can run simultaneously on a single Windows Server 2008 machine.