Virtualization
Technologies
... And what is needed to make it all work?
It all starts
with space, speed, growth and the technology to make it
work (the virtualization software)
How
fast does this need to be?
How much space is going to be needed?
How big will this get?
Whose technology shall I use to virtualize?
The speed of
your network is dependant on the speed or your physical media, your
network adapter and your switch/router configuration. The fastest
physical media are fiber optic cables that use light to transmit data
and can reach distances up to 2km. Fiber Optic is extremely popular in
Blade/SAN configurations due to the high amounts of data that have to be
transmitted. The network adapters can range from 10/100 NIC's to 8Gb/s
HBA's, usually in a PCI Express connection. To connect your server to
the internet or an external SAN you will need a high speed switch, some
of which come equipped with GBIC (Gigabit Interface)
HBA =
Host Bus Adapter
Fiber Optic Cable
High Speed GBIC Switch
Virtualized
environments often reside on external storage networks as it provides
easy and quick access to redundancy and failover. Virtualized Operating
Systems or Images often are built physically first with
applications built-in, service packs and updates installed and then
virtualized, also called PTV (physical to virtual) The same often
happens from virtualized to physical. However, converting 3rd party PTV
or VTP is limited. There is only one company presently that
can do both, and that is Microsoft utilizing the System Center Virtual
Machine Manger. As mentioned earlier, most of these images reside on
external storage, often called a SAN (storage area networks) that are
connected via high speed fiber optic. Depending on the size of your
images, you want to forecast the growth you will need and adjust your
storage size to meet those needs. The nice thing about a SAN is adding
storage is easy, and configuring them is a snap!
You can
choose Blade Servers with built in storage like an
Intel Modular
Server , an HP Blade with
onboard storage or you can choose separated components by themselves. Blade Servers are space efficient and offer aspects of
management not available in some other form factor servers such as
integrated remote administration, extremely quick access to hard drives,
power and cooling with redundancy fail over and replacement.
The software
you can use to virtualize is daunting. VMware, Microsoft Virtual Machine
Manager, Microsoft Hyper-V, Virtual Iron among many others can more
often than not, fit a specific need, and also provide you an array's of extra services. You
have to decide if you want to have your physical host with or without a
physical operating system (OS installed on top of the hardware ((bare
metal)) or virtual software on top of the hardware , also called hyper
visor) What services you want to be able to control for your virtual
environments also depends on the software you decide to use to control
them. The major decision is how much you want to administer your virtual
network and what if any services you want to have automated.
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Here
we have a 'bare metal' installation. A core component of
Hyper-V, Windows hypervisor is a thin layer of software between
the hardware and the OS that allows multiple operating systems
to run, unmodified, on a host computer at the same time. It
provides simple partitioning functionality and is responsible
for maintaining strong isolation between partitions. It has an
inherently secure architecture with minimal attack surface, as
it does not contain any third-party device drivers.
Microsoft Windows Server 2008
has the option to buy with or without the Hyper - V for
virtualization. You can also download the Hyper - V directly
from
Microsoft |
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Last update:
05/12/2009 08:39 AM
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