Server and network virtualization have been with us for quite a while now but I still run across people
that are new to the idea.
The basic concept is this a very low level application is installed on a server and it makes an inventory
of physical hardware to assess how that hardware can be offered up to simulate multiple isolated machines.
It can then assign virtual processors and portions of physical RAM as well as simulated network and
storage controllers and bundle all these resources together in a single file.
That is the virtual machine.
Then one or more files are created that emulate hard drives.
This allows you to open up a virtual machine consisting of only two or three files one representing
the resources available and one or more representing the hard drives that store the data.
This will allow you to more completely utilize all of the hardware available in high power servers and
configured correctly.
It can allow you to keep a server online even when some hardware issues may occur.
There are several major players in the virtualization space each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Hyper V is Microsoft's virtualization platform and it's been around since Windows Server 2008 and on
professional and enterprise workstations since Windows 8 and some of the features that we've already
discussed have had an impact on hyper v on Windows 20 19 servers.
The addition of data duplication in our CFS means virtual hard drives can now be stored on those volumes
in a way that is not only faster and more resilient but now also more efficient as well.
The improvements made to storage replica and storage spaces direct allow separate physical hosts to
maintain synchronized copies of the virtual hard drive which can allow for zero downtime even if an
entire datacenter goes dark unexpectedly but hyper v does have a few limitations more so in earlier
releases on Windows workstations.
The virtualization environment has created some conflicts when watching high resolution video through
common third party software.
This is still the case on current versions but that shouldn't be a problem when configuring a server.
The biggest limitation was that hyper v was designed to host Windows servers and had little consideration
for anything else.
The virtualize hardware was easy enough to understand but none of the features that make servers resilient
and protected worked on Linux environments virtualizing Mac environments is still a challenge because
of the way Apple licenses their product.
But Linux is a different story.
Linux servers are growing in popularity and in Windows Server 20 19 Microsoft has made some noteworthy
steps to accommodate Linux guest machines on hyper v hosts one of the features previously not available
to Linux guest machines was the server 2016 feature of shielded virtual machines and the host Guardian
server.
Going forward we're going to take a look at how that's been expanded to include this new market.