Virtualisation & Clustering

What Is Virtualisation?

Server virtualisation is a technology that has recently come of age, which allows the consolidation of many aging servers onto a small number of newer resilient servers; in some cases ratios of 30:1 have been reported. But consolidation is just the beginning! A virtualisation platform also provides high availability features which in effect cluster-enable legacy Operating Systems and applications without any modification. In many cases, you can seamlessly migrate a consolidated virtual machine from one physical server to another within seconds without ANY downtime! The holy grail of 100% uptime for critical applications is finally within reach.

What Are The Benefits?

Provisioning and testing new Operating Systems and applications is also a breeze as existing virtual machines can simply be cloned or used as templates for new virtual machines. In addition, before making any major changes, snapshots can be easily taken that allow administrators to seamlessly roll back systems to working order in seconds. Full virtual machine images can be backed up and replicated to remote sites for disaster recovery, solving another traditionally thorny problem.

Not Just For Servers

The concept of virtualisation can also be applied to your organisations desktops too, providing an easy way to deploy standard desktop images throughout that can be customized per user while using minimal bandwidth for access. Especially useful for applications that are not traditionally server friendly.