Virtualization

The IT infrastructure virtualization is one of the most commonly used technologies and a crucial element of IT solutions for companies of any size. It enables the optimization of the used resources and starting-up multiple virtual machines on one physical server. Virtualization is used for cluster creation which are devices made of a few physical servers and shared bulk memory. They are designed in a way that the failure of one element of a cluster does not influence the work continuity of virtual machines working on it. An additional advantage of cluster systems is the possibility of quick additional logical server creation within the used infrastructure practically for free. Newly created machines can be a copy of the already used systems and they can serve as a testing ground during updates or software changes.

Servers and virtual system administration

From the perspective of an operating system it does not matter if it is running on a physical server or on a virtualized machine. There are some nuances when it comes to the virtualization devices and the device resources of a service-hosting server. Not all of those resources are directly accessible for an operating system of a hosted machine, i.e. USB ports. On the other hand, cutting a virtualized machine from specific server components is a desired feature from the point of view of the virtualized machine migration between the cluster nodes. The systems are designed in a way that they are independent of certain equipment resources using the adequate network converters. The virtualized machine operating system administration itself operates in a similar way to a system based on the physical server.

Cluster

Protection clusters that are resistant to failure by providing the redundancy of certain elements are becoming more and more popular solutions even in smaller companies. Thanks to using the vSAN technology you can forgo buying relatively expensive disk arrays and use servers as the hosts of the hyper-convergence infrastructure solutions that include among others data collection space directly on the server resources.

Using the cluster does not limit itself to only booting the Linux or Windows servers. More and more often the equipment providers offer their solutions only as the cluster installation software without the need to buy a physical device. This solution is cheaper to install and maintain than buying the device because we do not additionally need to pay for the hardware and the high-level functionality is included in the price and comes from the operational role of the cluster and virtualization. The administration and backup preparation is also easier. Among the most common solutions provided by the software and not hardware is WiFi network controllers and security systems including e-mail or WWW traffic filters.

Conterization

Containers are a new virtualization trend. Conterization software such as Docker enables the construction of prototype images including all the necessary libraries and setting required by the applications. Contrary to the regular virtualization containers divide the resources of the operating system they are booted on. Virtualization on the operating system level has a few advantages with the biggest one being developer, testing, and production environment unification that directly influences the deployment speed and decreases the error number during software update uploading.
Containers are perfect for the horizontal resource scaling.