What is Virtualization?

In the technology world, virtualization generally means the abstraction of computer resources and can often relate to any number of concepts ranging from Platform or OS virtualization to Desktop or resource virtualization.

Virtual hosting is also often used on a large scale for internal purposes to provide a low cost alternative for keeping several separate websites and databases such as customer extranet website, employee extranet, internal intranet and intranets for different departments. This reduces management and administrative overhead and the number of separate servers required to support the business.

Why Virtualization?

There are many reasons why virtualization can be beneficial. Virtualization can allow for expanding hardware capabilities, allowing more simultaneous work to be done per machine. It can also improve efforts to control costs and simplify management through consolidation of servers. This day and age, there is an ever increasing need to control large multiprocessor and cluster installations and virtualization makes this possible. Virtualization allows for the running of complex, OS-dependant applications in different hardware or OS environments. Virtualization also provides improved security, reliability, and device independence possible from hypervisor architectures.

In the case of server consolidation, many small physical servers are replaced by one larger physical server, to increase the utilization of costly hardware resources. The large server can “host” many “guest” virtual machines. A virtual machine can be more easily controlled and inspected from outside than a physical one, and its configuration is more flexible.

A new virtual machine can be provisioned as needed without the need for an up-front hardware purchase. Also, a virtual machine can easily be relocated from one physical machine to another as needed. Unfortunately many networks are burdened with “single points of failure”. Many times it’s more of a cost-prohibitive issue in setting up redundancy than it is a network design problem. Some networks may only have a single mail server, or 1 pipe out to the Internet, 1 firewall, whatever. Because of the easy relocation, virtual machines can be used in disaster recovery scenarios.

How Virtualization?

Virtualization is only possible given the right combination of hardware and software elements. There are a number of software packages available for virtualization. Generally, a virtual machine monitor, also known as a “hypervisor”, is needed for successful virtualization.

A hypervisor is virtualization software that allows multiple operating systems to run on a host computer concurrently. A hypervisor runs directly on the host’s hardware as a hardware control and guest operating system monitor. This is where HyperVM by Lxlabs comes in.

Why InfoMedia, Inc. went with HyperVM.

HyperVM is a multi-platform, multi-tiered, multi-server, multi-virtualization web based application that allows the creation and management of different Virtual Machines each based on different technologies across machines and platforms.

HyperVM sports advanced features providing the capability to manage entire VPS hosting from a single console. HyperVM has been optimized for cross data-center clusters, allowing one to have servers spread across multiple data centers all over the world.

Some key features that HyperVM provides are the ability to manage an entire data center. HyperVM is successfully used to manage 1000s of VPSes on 100s of servers, centrally, with the slaves spread across different DCs. HyperVM allows efficient windows virtualization with advanced features like backup/restore built in. HyperVM provides support for multiple virtualization technologies and allows live migration. HyperVM centralized backup uses symlinks to provide extreme efficiency in backing up entire hosting. HyperVM provides an advanced browse backup feature in which an entire backup can be browsed and automatically be restored locally, without ever needing to contact the support.

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