Server Virtualisation
Server Virtualisation is the latest 'revolution' in IT. In the past, although one physical server could have many applications loaded onto it, it was often inadvisable to do so, as too many applications (email, database, security etc) could adversely affect reliability (cause crashes) and rebooting becomes a real nightmare!
This had to be tackled in one of three ways:
- Purchase more servers - EXPENSIVE and lots of almost empty boxes doing very little
- Put up with unreliability and disruption - VERY EXPENSIVE and inconvenient
- Hold back and don't take advantage of new technologies - VERY RESTRICTIVE
Server Virtualisation tackles these problems by allowing multiple instances of Windows (or Linux) to run on a single physical server. Each installation has no idea that the others exist so they are effectively separate machines. If a problem arises it will usually only affect one 'virtual' machine and this can then be restarted independently.
The other major advantage of this is that the virtual machines are hardware independent so larger companies who have serveral servers (and lots of virtual machines) can move them about for load balancing and to recover from hardware failures etc.
Essentially, this can reduce the cost of installing and maintaining your IT infrastructure significantly.
