Server Virtualisation

All of our servers are housed on High Availability virtual clusters.

Physical server installations are a thing of the past and virtualisation is the answer to get more reliable, secure and transparent servers. It allows you the flexibility to install on hardware on your own premises, on a private cloud not shared with others or on a cloud shared with others.

JCR Computers highly believes in server virtualisation, all of our servers are housed on High Availability virtual clusters. This means less power, less hardware, higher security, less maintenance cost and a higher up-time.

Chances are that upon reading this you are not going to shut down your servers this coming weekend, wheel out the old servers, and install brand new, more powerful ones.

It is much more likely that you’re going to bring in new equipment as your replacement plan dictates.

What we suggest is – when replacing a server – is to start with virtualisation.

In addition, when you do start replacing equipment, it’s a smart idea to consolidate your servers with virtualisation

By consolidating servers, you can:

• Increase utilisation of existing hardware from 10-15 percent, up to 80 percent
• Reduce servers at a 5-to-1 ratio
• Reduce hardware and operating costs by as much as 50 percent

Traditionally, servers were setup with a “one workload, one server” philosophy. In this model it means that if you need an additional server for some purpose, you buy a new server. If you need an e-mail server, you get a new server. However, each required service is then not making optimal use of the the resources to justify a single dedicated machine. As mentioned earlier, most servers only operate at about 10 to 15 percent of their total load capacity.

Therefore, consolidating services onto a virtualised environment allows you to fully utilise the server potential whilst also increasing up-time of the service. Virtualised servers are generally implemented in clusters, allowing a high availability workload of services to be spread over multiple virtual server hosts. This also makes it easier to manage and change resources statically or dynamically so each service gets the power it needs.

A virtual server host can either be on owned hardware, where one virtual host system hosts one or more virtual machines. It can also however be hardware owned and operated by JCR Computers which removes the requirement to invest in hardware and takes away concerns with the operation and management. Thirdly, a combination of both is possible where servers with high data transfers are located on the local premise and others – with lower data requirements, or for redundancy purposes – are stationed remotely.

A major additional benefit of server virtualisation is risk reduction. No longer is a server backup tied to the specifications of the server hardware and operating system. With a clone(backup) of the virtualised server it only requires to reload the clone onto another virtual server host to be back up and running.