Virtualization: Cost-Effective Solutions
Whether you’re virtualizing your workloads or building a private cloud, the technologies available within the virtualization platform in Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V can provide cost-effective solutions. Take a quick look at these two instances:
1. Technology Specialists, Fort Wayne, IN
Jay Tipton, CEO of Technology Specialists, a company that provides technology services to small businesses, called on virtualization to help a 15-employee company that needed to run multiple e-commerce sites for its business. The licensing for the software application used to run the stores required them to be managed separately.
Tipton says this business may have been forced to buy and set up three different hardware servers. But it was able to buy a single system to run all three stores-running separately using virtualization software.
2. HotSchedules in Austin, Texas
Microsoft customer HotSchedules provides online services as its core product offering. Each time it adds a certain number of new customers, it needs to invest in the technology backbone to support their accounts seamlessly, even in times of peak usage. Before it moved to a virtual architecture, the company reported that it would sometimes take weeks to provision a new server.
With Hyper-V, that process has been cut down to a day or less. What’s more, the case study reports that by running up to 19 virtual machines on each of its physical servers HotSchedules was able to reduce power costs by up to 77%compared with the energy it would have needed to run a comparable number of “real” systems.
With Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V, you have the flexibility to build a server environment that can support your business needs in any phase of your IT life cycle. Here are some more benefits:
Increase Business Flexibility
As virtualized datacenters become more prevalent, you need to be able to place your workloads where they fit best, and you need to be able to quickly and easily migrate your workloads between servers to best distribute the load. Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V allows you to live migrate your virtual machines and independently migrate your virtual machine storage with few limitations—from outside a clustered environment, between two clusters, and even between two servers with nothing but a network connection between them.
Increase Support for Larger Workloads
To help you run the largest workloads in your virtualized environment, Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V offers support for up to 64 virtual processors and 1 terabyte of memory for your Hyper-V guests and 4,000 virtual machines on a 64-node cluster. With Hyper-V, you can support Offloaded Data Transfer and improved Quality of Service to enforce minimum bandwidth requirements (even network storage).
Increase Virtual Machine Availability
High-availability options include incremental backup support, enhancements in clustered environments to support virtual Fibre Channel adapters within the virtual machine, and inbox NIC Teaming. Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V can also use server message block file shares for virtual storage. This new option is simple to provision and offers performance capabilities and features that rival those available with Fibre Channel storage area networks.
Improve Handling of Multi-tenant Environments
Hyper-V multitenancy provides you with new security and multi-tenant isolation capabilities that can keep virtual machines isolated, even when they are stored on the same physical network or server. New network virtualization features in Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V can help you scale beyond virtual local area network implementations. You can place a virtual machine on a node regardless of its IP address, whether on-site, hosted, or in the cloud, making the network infrastructure truly invisible.
Additional capabilities include Resource Metering to help with showback (internal accounting) and chargeback (external customers) scenarios by giving you visibility into the use of your virtualization environment.
Provide More Options
As you rely more upon virtualization, you need to be able to handle different types of requests. Some of those requests usually fall under networking options. The Hyper-V Extensible Switch within Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V gives you an open, extensible switch to help support security and management needs. You can build your own extensions, or use partner extensions to support these needs.
Hyper-V works with Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1 management tools to handle your multiserver virtualization environment. With new management support for Hyper-V, you can fully automate management tasks and help reduce the administrative overhead costs of your environment.
At New Horizons, we’re talking about IT everyday—and not just with a variety of clients, but with leading vendors—about industry trends and real-life challenges. And because of our these close partnerships, New Horizons is positioned to help businesses like yours leverage our knowledge experts to discuss strategies, implementation and troubleshooting.
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