Posts tagged Virtual Infrastructure
Virtualization and you – the business user
Feb 16th
Why virtualize? Better yet, why use virtualized server services for your business?
I’ll try to answer that question in this blog post, though from a service provider point of view, but I’ll try to remove my bias where feasible.
Summary: For many business needs, a virtualized server on a hosting providers infrastucture is very cost effective, very secure, and highly reliable. When those 3 items are combined, the argument to use separate, physical servers becomes moot. Virtualized server services are not for everyone, nor for ever task at hand, but for many, it is the more right solution.
Now that the summary is done, you can can read on for details as to why I think the above statements are true or just head on over to ipHouse and talk to sales and see what we can do for you, or both.
First, virtualization has a few meanings, but for this context, I am talking about the concept of taking a physical server (call it a host) and carving it into many virtual systems (call them guests) running concurrently. Here’s a picture from using VMware atoms to help visualize what I am getting at:
VM -> Host visualization
This allows the ability to spread the cost of a fast and expensive physical server amongst multiple guest systems.
Virtualization and the ISP (part 2)
Oct 4th
Ah, the dreaded part 2 of the series.
I ordered my test system from Dell on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008, and the box shipped on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008. I am excitedly waiting for it.
The box I ordered is to test out the I/O performance for the mail server virtualization, the config is:
- Quad Core Xeon E5420, 2.5Ghz, 2x6MB L2 Cache, 1333Mhz FSB
- 16GB (8x2GB FBDIMM)
- Quantity 4 146GB, 15K RPM SAS disks
- PERC6/i RAID controller
- Dual Port Intel 1000PT
So, not a huge machine, though not small either. If this works out well, then I’ll order up 8 of them to start the compression of my physical servers into virtual servers.
Virtualization and the ISP (part 1)
Sep 17th
With things changing all over the marketplace, virtualization has, again, come to the forefront as the savior of the data center.
And wouldn’t you know, I’d like to save my data center, at least some power and cooling needs.
I have started to review how we use our servers and where we could do combining to save power, cooling, and rack space. During this installment, I’ll be discussing the usage, and combining, of 3 parts of our network:
- POP/IMAP servers
- Apache based web servers
- SMTP (inbound, delivery, outbound) servers
