Server Virtualization
Virtualization is a technology that allows you to consolidate and better utilize your sever infrastructure. Our professional services department uses propriety methods and solutions to deploy your virtual infrastructure in minimal time. Migrating your physical infrastructure to a virtualized one can be a effortless task with the right guidance. Call us today for a free consultation.
Elysium Solutions specializes in virtualization technologies. We feel that by offering unbiased solutions is the only way to solve problems. Because of this, we will provide honest and impartial feedback to tailor to your environment and offer you the best solution. Below are the major players when it comes to virtualization, and our conclusions for each. We recommend calling us for the most accurate assessment of your environment and we can tell you what the best solution is for you.
The Xen hypervisor is a unique open source technology, developed
collaboratively by the Xen community and engineers at over 20 of the well
known data center solution vendors including: AMD, Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM,
Intel, Mellanox, Network Appliance, Novell, Red Hat, SGI, Sun, Unisys,
Veritas, Voltaire, and Citrix. Xen is licensed under the GNU General
Public License (GPL2) and is available at no charge in both source and
object format. Xen is and always will be open sourced, uniting the
industry and the Xen ecosystem to speed the adoption of virtualization in
the enterprise. The Xen hypervisor is also exceptionally lean-- less than
150,000 lines of code. Xen re-uses existing device drivers (both closed
and open source) from Linux. Many of the major Virtualization vendors use
Xen's hypervisor, including VirtualIron, Redhat, and Citrix. Xen claims
that their paravirtualization technology is the fastest and most secure
virtualization software in the industry. Xen claims to offer near-native
performance for virtual servers with up to 10 times less overhead than
proprietary offerings, and benchmarked overhead of well under 5% in most
cases compared to 35% or higher overhead rates for other virtualization
technologies.
Click here for our analysis of Redhat.
Click here for more information on Citrix.
VMware holds the majority of market share in regards to x86 virtualization.
They pioneered x86 virtualization and have an impressive customer base.
The technologies are proven reliable, and they have a plethora of products
that accommodate staging requirements, disaster recovery, and desktop
virtualization. VMware has already claimed 100% of the Fortune 100, 98%
of the Fortune 500 (491 out of 500) and 96% of the Fortune 1000 (955 out
of 1000). This premium product does come at a price though. Licenses for
the features and management solutions cost money, but VMware does make
the ESX 3i hypervisor available for free. VMware claims an overhead as
small as 3% to 6% for computationally-intensive applications.
Click here for the license structure/our analysis of VMware.
Click here to see our VMware showcase
As of December 2008, Hyper-V does not currently support access to USB
devices or sound support in Guest VMs. Also, Hyper-V does not support
'live migration' of guest VMs, where 'live migration' is defined as
maintaining network connections and uninterrupted services during VM
migration. Instead, Hyper-V on Server 2008 Enterprise and Datacenter
Editions supports 'quick migration', during which a guest VM is suspended
on one host and resumed on another host. This operation happens in the
time it takes to transfer the active memory of the Guest VM over the
network from the first host to the second host. Live Migration is
supported with Windows Server 2008 R2 (currently a public beta is
available) which will be available in the second half of 2009.