Microsoft Virtual Server Overview

Exploring Microsoft Virtual Server

Over the decades, the hardware performances of the computer systems that we use have grown at a spectacular rate. There is always a hungry software application eager to eat up all the power; however, at the same time, there are multiple machines that easily run at a smaller portion of their entire capacity, consuming a considerable space, significant administrative effort and many of your valuable resources. In such a scenario, if you have ever wished to see a server broken down into smaller pieces to increase the productivity and simply not just to work up your own frustration, then the virtual server can be the most promising solution that you have ever thought of.

Virtual World Is Surely Taking Over the Real One!

To put this in simple words, virtual servers allow the running of multiple OS at the same time on a single machine. There are multiple Virtual PC products versions released by Microsoft Corporation for various workstations, out of which, the recent one is the Virtual Server 2005, and along with this are the subsequent releases of Virtual Server 2005 R2, which can prove dramatically advantageous for any company’s IT department. The MS Virtual Server 2005 is basically a service running on Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003. With the help of the Microsoft Virtual Server, you can very easily host even as large as 64 VMs i.e. virtual machines; each of them running its own OS, on a provided host system.

Microsoft Virtual Server Storage – VHD

MS Virtual Server is a highly scalable program for server virtualization which is distributed worldwide by Microsoft Corporation enabling more than one OSs to simultaneously run on one single physical server. This program easily operates without any 3rd-party device drivers and even gives complete separation among various partitions. This server program is widely used for consolidation of servers in various business networks and multiple data centers worldwide. It is also utilized by many software engineers across the world. To manage virtual drives, it creates .vhd files.

Digging More into the Concept

Virtualization is all about taking one single OS, and rather than installing in over its own devoted physical hardware, we install it on a virtual hardware provided by Microsoft that runs on a physical server. The best part about his virtualization is the isolation of every connected virtual system. Every virtual system connected to the server is unaware of other virtual systems running on the same virtual server. Unfortunately, if any one of the virtual machines gets crashed, it will definitely not pose any threat of crashing on the other machines and virtual servers.

Major Merits of Virtualization

• Highly Beneficial for the Production Data Centers:
  Any new technology which you plan to implement in your working environment, it is always best to first and foremost implement it in a test or pilot or production method for ensuring the stability of the production systems. A chief reason for production virtualization is that- approximately, ninety percent of MS Windows-based production servers usually run below ten percent of average utilization. And this is why virtualization is so much widespread in today’s time. You can save a lot of money just by dropping the number of physical servers purchased.

• Recoverability:
  The hard drive of every virtual server represents by one single file. Thus, you can easily take the snapshot of this single file for the purpose of backup. Virtual R1 as well as many later versions of the Microsoft Virtual server support VSS for the file snapshots. This being the prime reason for leveraging this modern-day technology in the situations of data losses or data corruption. Take for example, you apply the most recent SP to your virtual server, and right after the automatic reboot, the system shows a blue screen. Having a snapshot of the file of the hard disk drive that your operating system was on can help you restore it within seconds and go back to the situation before the application of that latest service pack. This saves your time of potentially rebuilding the entire virtual server again.