Server Virtualisation

In a physical server world, there are numerous challenges to managing the infrastructure:

• Upgrades to the underlying hardware requires server (and hence application) downtime
• The server infrastructure is not scalable
• There is much complexity to deliver high availability – if this is even possible
• Expensive and lack of flexibility when deploying options for operating systems and applications

Enter Server Virtualisation

Since the turn of the millennium a new set of technologies have been developed that effectively allow a single physical server to be “carved up” into a number of virtual servers that share the underlying hardware resources. This makes it possible to pool resources such as memory and compute and to dynamically allocate these to the various virtual machines running on the server. The technology that makes this possible is known as a “Hypervisor”. A hypervisor runs on top of the physical server and acts as an abstraction layer for the underlying hardware and allows multiple virtual machines to share all of the physical machine’s RAM, compute and networking as they run in a virtual environment on top of the hypervisor.

Companies such as VMware, Microsoft, Oracle and Citrix have developed a set of technologies and have released these into the marketplace over the past decade or so:

• RedHat Enterprise Virtualization (KVM)
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• VMware vSphere
• Citrix Xen Server

Server consolidation via the adoption of a virtualisation hypervisor is the first step to full private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructure adoption. The adoption of a particular hypervisor will determine the capabilities the solution can provide to a particular client, for example high availability to offer resilience and automatic failover of virtual servers in the event that the underlying physical server experiences a problem. This allows for near-instantaneous recovery of a virtual server on another physical server that forms part of the cluster.

Eurotech supports the mainstream hypervisor vendors and has the required skills and experience to successfully deploy any virtual infrastructure, with engineers that are VMware Certified Professionals and/or Microsoft MSCE, MCP, MCP+I certified.

Depending on which virtualisation solution is adopted, Eurotech can deliver solutions in the following areas:

• Server Virtualisation/Consolidation
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
• Application Virtualisation
• Storage Virtualisation

For more information, visit the pages below:

• VMware
• Hyper-V