Virtualization on dedicated servers

virtualization technology OVHcloud

What is virtualization?

OVHcloud has fostered close partnerships with global leaders in the field of virtualization technology for a number of years. Our ranges of dedicated bare-metal servers have been designed to underpin industry-leading virtualization software, including VMware’s benchmark offering. 

The server virtualization process involves installing a hypervisor on a bare-metal server, which allows you to segment and isolate its various resources into virtual machines. In other words, it converts physical resources into virtual ones, for more effective resource utilization, complementing the guaranteed resources of physical hardware by maximizing flexibility, scalability, and availability. This, in turn, will enhance application performance and service delivery, while helping build a robust IT infrastructure.

Scalability – simple IT growth Cost optimization – maximize your ROI Flexibility – low risk/low-cost experimentation

The ease of deployment of new servers can speed up your go-to-market for new products and services, and enhance your overall business agility.

It takes just a few steps in a user-friendly online control panel to provision new virtual servers, or redeploy resources to wherever they are needed (including as part of disaster recovery plans). This level of agility and manageability can be challenging to achieve with other hosting solutions.

All Scale and High Grade servers come with the choice of industry-standard SSD discs or NVMe discs (for superior transfer speeds) at no additional cost, as is a basic configuration service, should you require it. All discs also now come with hot-swapping capabilities, making it possible to swap discs while your server is still running, ensuring downtime is kept to the absolute minimum during maintenance or upgrades.

Virtualization lets you do more with less. Thanks to consolidation, companies can dramatically reduce the number of physical machines they need and get more out of their server hardware. 

Fewer physical machines naturally means lower spending on hardware costs, for one thing, without compromising mission-critical applications or business continuity measures, such as backup and recovery.

Virtualization allows you to easily deploy and delete secure, isolated virtual environments, whenever you need them. This gives you more flexibility to test and innovate. 

Sysadmins and DevOps can experiment with different operating systems and apps on the same machine, take VM snapshots before making risky changes, and clone machines to avoid lengthy operating system installations. 
   
     

Virtualizing a dedicated server vs. pure bare metal

While a bare-metal dedicated server is still unmatched in terms of raw power, hardware virtualization is the answer whenever flexibility, speed, and cost are top priorities.

With provisioning time reduced by as much as 70%, according to VMware, fast, low-cost solutions can be effortlessly deployed in virtual environments. Equally, sysadmins widely use server virtualization for temporary projects, testing, and troubleshooting.

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Tip 1. Select the right virtualization software 

The combination of VMware virtualization technology – including the vSphere, hypervisor, and vRack – with OVHcloud’s world-class bare metal server ranges, is the ideal foundation on which to build your own virtual infrastructure. However, OVHcloud servers can also be deployed with other virtualization software, including Zen and Proxmox. Some of these are free, while others are paid services, and each offers distinct advantages and disadvantages.

Tip 2. Don’t neglect your backup processes! 

If you are deploying your infrastructure on a standalone server, a secure, reliable backup solution is vital, to ensure you don’t acquire a single point of failure.

Tip 3. Consider your path to the cloud

OVHcloud and VMware virtualization technology enable the smooth integration of cloud and bare-metal solutions, leading to sophisticated Hybrid Cloud infrastructures, which combine the benefits of multiple solutions in unique, tailored combinations. A virtualized server is, therefore, an ideal stepping stone to a fully-agile VMware Private Cloud environment, which includes advanced automation features and tools.