Server Installs & Maintenance
Virtual Servers
Virtual Servers is still a new term to most people, but the concept isn’t difficult to grasp. In a virtual environment there is a very small piece of software on which other Operating Systems are installed. Thesavings can be enormous as you can run several Operating Systems in this virtual environment at the same time! It is very common to need several servers because they all do different jobs, but now you may only need about 25% of the hardware. Another HUGE benefit to this is portability. In a traditional server the Operating System is tightly integrated with the hardware. If the hardware fails and you need to move to a new server, this can be a huge undertaking. In a virtual environment, the hardware is; you guessed it; virtual! If you find yourself suddenly needing to move to an entirely new server (even if it’s just temporary), you literally just copy it over and run it! Your server then runs as though nothing ever happened. Now you are free to upgrade or fix your old server and move back later, or stay on the new server, it’s up to you.
Traditional Servers
In most small businesses where only one server is used, it’s normally installed directly onto the hardware. In the event of a failure, normally the quickest route is to replace the failed hardware with identical hardware. This gets more difficult the older the server is. In some cases we can take an image of a failed server and turn it into a virtual server and have you up and running on different hardware quickly.