What is virtualisation?

Virtualisation provides the ability to partition a single physical server into a number of individual and quite separate virtual private servers (VPS). Multiple virtual private servers then run on the physical server, sharing the resources of that single server.

You can safely run a different operating system on each VPS and choose different levels of RAM or hard drive for each VPS. Each VPS is allocated a sufficient computing resource and additional capacity is always built into the physical or host server.

How does virtualisation work?

A thin layer of software is installed on the host server. The software allows the user to create virtual private servers and contains a virtual machine monitor or “hypervisor" that allocates hardware resources dynamically and transparently so that multiple operating systems can run concurrently on a single server.
Each virtual private server has access to a dedicated amount of RAM and hard disk together with a virtual NIC (Network Interface Card). It also has access to an allocated amount of CPU resource to ensure continued performance.

Benefits of virtualisation

There are many advantages to using virtualisation. Here are just a few:

Virtual private servers provide the flexibility to test applications on different operating systems on the same server
Virtualisation reduces the number of servers used creating energy efficiencies improving carbon footprint
Virtualisation creates savings by reducing the number of physical servers required and increases server utilisation.

NetBenefit provides both Hyper-V based virtual dedicated servers and VMware solutions.