Question

What type of virtualization does Windows Server offer?

How does it compare to VMWare?

What are some advantages of Windows Server Virtualization?

Answer 1

Window server offers Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, formerly known as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. . Hyper-V is a type-1, native hypervisor designed by Microsoft, which allows creating and managing multiple virtualized versions of a computer, called virtual machines (VMs). Hyper-V provides a virtualization platform on which you can build IT infrastructure of any level of complexity. Each VM, in this case, is running in its own isolated space, without interfering with the processes in other VMs.

Vmware and Hyper-v are different company products but both serve the same feature i.e virtualization.

The differences on comparing VMware and Hyper-V are as follows:

• Vmware supports Dynamic Memory Support for all types of Operating Systems whereas Hyper-V supports only for Windows
• Referring to scalability Vmware support’s only 160 logic processors but Hyper-V supports 320 logical processors.
• The RAM capacity of Vmware servers is 2TB whereas Hyper-V server holds 4TB RAM.
• One should pay premium amount for Vmware Server license , but most of the Hyper-V enterprise are available at free of cost.
• Based on the required features companies pick whatever is required.

Vmware: Vmware is a publicly functioning software virtualization company founded in 1998. It is known for virtualization. It provides different software related to virtualization and in addition to that it provides products cloud computing products as well.

Hyper-V : It is a Microsoft hardware virtualization product, it supports in creating and running a software version of your computer thus called as virtual machine. Every virtual machine behaves similar to a computer , with programs and a running operating system. Virtual machines help us in saving time and money, provides more flexibility and its more efficient way to operate in using hardware, whenever we need computing resources.

It runs each virtual machine in its own isolated space. This enables to run more than one virtual machine on the same hardware at a time. This helps to avoid problems such as crashing, or if you want to give it to different people, different groups etc..

Some advantages of Windows Server virtualization are :

Saves Cost & Time
By running multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical server, virtualization lets you reduce costs while increasing the efficiency and utilization of your existing x86 hardware.

     Reduce capital and operating costs. Server consolidation lets you get more out of your existing hardware by running multiple virtual machines (VM) on a single physical server. Fewer servers means lower capital and operating costs. For the most cost savings, make sure you go with a virtualization solution that has the highest VM density per host.

     Deliver high application availability. Integrated availability and fault tolerance protects all your virtualized applications. Should a node or server ever fail, all its VMs are automatically restarted or continued on another machine, with no downtime or data loss.

   Improve business continuity. Virtualization makes it easier to survive unplanned potential IT disasters. You can move VMs from one server to another in a different location.

     Increase IT productivity. Streamlined and automated management tasks mean you’ll spend less time on maintenance and more time on innovation.

     Improve responsiveness. Virtualization lets your business scale rapidly because you can deploy desktops, applications and servers quickly and flexibly.