Server Consolidation Paper

The major advantage of virtualization is server consolidation. For example, a small company that desires to run its email, the web, Active Directory, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and document storage solution would benefit from this technology. No longer would the company need to purchase separate servers for each computing resource rather the purchase of two servers with the capacity and horsepower to maintain the resources would be required. In this paper, we compare and contrast the top three (3) brands of virtualization software available, examine the major pros and major cons of each of the top three (3) software packages available, recommend the virtualization software that you feel is most appropriate for the organization.

Type 1 virtualization is designed to run on bare-metal systems and is its operating system. The second form of virtualization is Type 2 that is software based and is running within an existing operating system (TechTarget, 2010). There are three top contenders for Type 1 virtualization software yet there are challenges that make the completion more than interesting (Gartner, 2014). In Table 1, we show the different offerings of virtualization by type and class of host used. VMware, Microsoft, and Oracle are the top three contenders when it comes to virtualization. Now let us compare the three companies and what it takes to make virtualization

Since this time, Microsoft has branched into many different aspects of computers such as hardware and the Xbox and now Virtualization. Microsoft could not ignore virtualization and the trending of the business taking advantage of the consolidation of servers. Currently, there are four versions of Hyper-V first introduced in Windows 2008, then Windows 2008 R2, then Windows Server 2012, and finally Windows Server 2012 R2. Hyper-V is a server role that is dependent on the following hardware requirements. the first hardware requirement is an x64-based processor 1.4GHz or better and the supporting operating system such as Windows 2012 R2. The second hardware requirement is that the CPU supports Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) or AMD Virtualization (AMD-V). Hardware-enforced Data Execution Prevention (DEP) must be available and enabled. The DEP setting allows the Intel XD bit or AMD NX bit. The minimum requirement just for the operating system is 512MB, however if you are going to run other windows machines it is recommended that fifteen virtual machines on a single host you will need 64GB of ram. For the network connections, the same requirement for Microsoft is the same as VMware in that one adaptor minimum with either a 1GB or a 10GB port. Storage can be local to the server or using an SCSI Adapter, Fiber Channel, or Internal RAID controller to connect to