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Virtualization is a technology that divides physical server resources among multiple users and applications. The best example to explain the idea of virtualization is an apartment building.
A virtual server is an apartment in an apartment building
A country house owner has to take care of water and power supply, wood harvesting and organizing heating. Residents of the apartment building do not have to care about public utilities, because they provided by a city.
A server is a piece of equipment that hosts data. A physical server is like a country house. However, it is possible to make an apartment building from it — this is where you'll need virtualization.
With private servers, many people use the same physical server, but everyone has his own independent amount of computing resources. Therefore, different virtual servers hosted on the same physical server may have different operating systems, regardless of OS family. No matter what operating system your neighbor uses, you can use the one you want as if you'd have your own dedicated server.
Why do you need virtualization
Imagine an online store hosted on a dedicated server. The store itself requires only a few Gb of disk space, so the major part of computing resources is unused.
An owner of the online store decided to start sending emails with promo-codes for customers to raise sales. So, a mail server is required. It was launched on the same server with the store itself since it had resources available.
The mailing was successful and hundreds of visitors flooded the online store and it went down. It caused the mail server crash as well. After this case, the website owner decided to host the website separately from the mail server. So they bought another server.
When the store needed to launch a CRM for employees, the owner decided to use virtualization instead of buying another server. The first server was divided into two virtual servers for hosting the website and mail server. Now they don't affect each other. The CRM system for employees was deployed on the second server.
This is how virtualization can save computing resources and cut costs. .
How does virtualization work
We've learned that virtualization allows you to run multiple virtual private servers (VPS) on the same physical server. All these virtual machines share resources of the physical computer: memory, processors, hard disk space.
A hypervisor is a special software for distributing these resources between virtual machines and isolating them from each other. The hypervisor is installed on the operating system or directly on the hardware.
The hypervisor allows creating virtual machines and work with them same as with real physical servers. A virtual machine is very similar to a dedicated one. Some of the possible actions you can do with VPS:
Виртуальные машины получаются очень похожими на физический сервер. Их можно:
- turn on,
- turn off,
- restart,
- install and reinstall almost any OS and other software.
KVM — is a hypervisor, built in Linux kernel. It is possible to use the console for managing KVM hypervisor, but it’s way easier if you’ll have a control panel with a graphical interface.
Where can the virtualization be used
Virtualization helps you to use your hardware more efficiently and solve business issues faster.
Creating a virtual server is much cheaper and easier than buying and deploying a physical server. The volume of computing resources may be configured for every VPS to fit the tasks it was created for. Even if you need to install different operating systems at every VM you host on one dedicated server — it is not a problem.
These advantages make virtualization incredibly popular. Virtual machines are suitable for a variety of tasks and can be used everywhere.
VPS may host:
- websites,
- mail servers,
- CRM,
- VPN,
- game servers,
- testing environments.
VMmanager 6 — a convenient control panel for virtualization
VMmanager makes virtualization technologies available to anyone. You can create virtual machines on Linux or Windows and resell them to your clients or use them for own needs.
Hosting providers use VMmanager to automate VPS provisioning. Web developers, admins, software development companies and other commercial organizations and freelancers use it to create isolated virtual machines.
Other advantages of VMmanager:
- All-in-one solution: the panel may replace the console, tables for equipment inventory, diagnostic and monitoring tools.
- Simple and convenient interface: panel users may easily create VMs of the desired configuration and manage the whole virtual environment.
- Task management and troubleshooting: If you encounter a problem, it is easy to find the cause in the Task Log.
Feel free to run the demo to evaluate the capabilities of VMmanager. If you want to test it on-premise, you may download and install it on your server. 30 days for free!