Hmmmm. We seem to revisit topics that start with the letter V once a month, whether we need it or not. Last month is was Vista, this month we investigate virtual servers, specifically VMware. VMware Inc. is an EMC company, the makers of high-end storage devices.

Virtual servers are pretty much what they sound like. You begin with one physical server and then by loading the virtual server software you can have multiple “virtual” servers running on that same machine. Your limitations of course will be a function of memory, CPU and disk.

So what would a business use this technology for?

Run various test environments. This is one of the most common applications. You could have an application you want to test under Windows 2000, XP and Vista. VMware would allow you to set up all three environments simultaneously on the same machine. You can even create checkpoints or Snapshots at various stages of testing that you can easily roll back to in the event of an error. If the virtual server becomes corrupted, simply wipe it out and reload without rebuilding the whole machine.

Re-host legacy applications. You may have an old application that won’t run on the latest hardware and software. VMware can let you run legacy operating systems on newer hardware.

Provide redundant servers for more robust application continuity. Run additional copies of mission critical software on a virtual server to take over if the main copy goes down for some reason.

Consolidate servers. With the right hardware and high-end VMware applications you can control server sprawl by running multiple applications on fewer, highly-scaled servers.

What does this all cost?

Costs range from free to several thousands of dollars depending on how robust of an environment you are trying to create and the range of features you need. VMware Server is available free of charge for simple, small testing environments. At the high end is VMware ESX Server, designed for data center management and optimization and it is – well – not free.

Microsoft offers a similar product simply known as Virtual Server but VMware seems to be more popular, although the Microsoft product should certainly be part of your review.

You can also find virtual desktop environments from both companies but we’ll leave these for a future blog. Unless of course we select another “V” topic next month.

Links:

http://www.vmware.com/overview/

VMware home site. Lots of good product information, white papers and you can order here too.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/virtualserver/

Microsoft’s virtual server home page.

Filed under: Business Articles on July 3rd, 2007 |