Virtualization

Virtualization allows for multiple virtual ‘servers’ (Virtual Machines) to run on a single physical server simultaneously. ChinaNetCloud provides virtualization services based on Xen and VMware’s server platforms, as part of our Cloud Computing infrastructure.

Virtualization and Cloud Computing have many benefits, especially in consolidation of servers to save cost. But other benefits include separating a server from its hardware, providing enhanced reliability and availability, allowing easier testing, and making overall management easier.

ChinaNetCloud modern servers are ideal platforms for virtualization, which is recommended  for a wide variety of servers and applications. Also, for testing, there are many special options available that make proper multi-server production mirror testing possible for the first time at reasonable cost. 

For virtualized production servers, these are typically deployed in pairs for redundancy and failover; this can also help in the migration of existing servers to a virtualized environment and in testing server upgrades. Using shared storage, virtualization allows for live failover of virtual machines from server to server, which provides for any application to be deployed in a cost-effective high-availability configuration.

Linux
The most common virtual machine in the cloud is Linux, which runs easily on all virtualization platforms. All normal Linux kernels, tools, and applications run well on this system.
 

Windows
Windows servers can also run on most virtualized servers, though not quite as easily as Linux. But systems such as Windows Server 2003 are very common, including applications such as SQL Server, Exchange, IIS/.Net, and many others.