If you are a novice to the area of web hosting, you may be wondering: “What is virtualization?” Virtualization involves both hardware and software that work in tandem to facilitate the creation and management of virtual servers, otherwise called virtual machines. The hypervisor is the software element of virtualization. The hypervisor is what bridges the gap between the physical hardware and the virtual machines. In brief, there are two types of hypervisors. Type 1 hypervisors, like VMWare’s ESXi or KVM, run directly on the physical hardware. Whereas Type 2 hypervisors run within a guest operating system on top of the hardware. Type 1 hypervisors are generally better because they have reduced overhead.
Benefits of Virtualized Hosting
Provisioning
Virtualization has a number of benefits when compared to hosting on physical machines. First and foremost, when a customer orders a Virtual Private Server (VPS) we can have the virtual machine provisioned within a few minutes. Through virtualization, we not only have the ability to create new servers in a short amount of time, but we can also make sure that the new servers are up to date by keeping the templates from which VM’s derive updated.
Scalability
The next benefit of virtualization is scalability. Let’s say you order a cPanel Cloud Server (silver level) and down the road you decide the applications running on your server need more hardware. We can easily upgrade your server’s CPU, RAM, and hard drive allocation in minutes without having to create a new server. This amazing feature allows us to help you grow your server as your business grows.
Reliability
Next, and perhaps one of the greatest benefits of virtualization, is the inherent reliability of virtualization. In our system specifically, we have a number of physical servers that each run VMWare’s ESXi hypervisor. All hosts are joined into clusters, which means powered on virtual machines can be moved from one ESXi host to another seamlessly without interruption or downtime, even if the host it resides on fails. This type of fault tolerance allows our customers to receive optimal uptime.
Management Efficiency
From our perspective, virtualization allows us to more efficiently manage our infrastructure. More efficient management allows us to ensure that our virtualized infrastructure is running in optimal condition to foster the best performance for all of our customers, shared and VPS alike.
Recovery
It’s always recommend to have a safety net in case of some sort of VM or guest operating system failure. With VMWare and KVM virtualized servers, recovering an entire VM is simple. VMWare virtual machines consist of a few different configuration files and virtual hard disks where your data is actually stored. Through our SAN replication, we can quickly pull a VM’s virtual hard disk from a backup to restore.
If you have any questions or concerns about moving your physical servers to virtual machines hosted in our Private Cloud, feel free to contact our sales department at [email protected] or schedule a Cloud consultation for a time convenient for you.
Tags: VPS HostingCategories: Developers, Hosting