How Does Virtualization Relate to Cloud Hosting?

In days gone by, servers were often setup to run a single application that served a number of people over a network. A web server might deliver information to company employees through an intranet, while another web server helped external users through the Internet. That model was a "one server, one application" design.

Cloud hosting and virtualization eliminate many of the limitations inherent in the traditional single server single application hosting model. First, a single server represents a single point of failure. If the server is down, it cloud affect thousands of potential customers leading to a drop in sales and profits. Even under ideal circumstances this design requires scheduled downtime for upgrades and maintenance.

Cloud hosting, on the other hand, is redundant by design. Hard drives or even entire servers in the cloud can fail without any impact on the availability of your server or application because the cloud automatically detects failures and reroutes the requests to another server within the cloud. Unfortunately setting up a cloud is an expensive venture not financially feasible for many small to medium businesses. Thankfully the pairing of cloud hosting with virtualization allows those businesses to share or rent a portion of a cloud.

How Does Virtualization Relate to Cloud Hosting?

Virtualization takes the physical resources of a single server - its central processor, memory and hard drives - and, with special software, causes that physical computer to act like several "virtual" computers. Each virtual computer can run a different application, even a different operating system: Windows in one virtual partition, VMware, Debian, Ubuntu or Red Hat Linux in another.

A special piece of virtualization software called a "hypervisor" controls and allocates resources to each virtual machine to assure smooth and reliable operation among operating systems and applications. A cloud hosting service provider can provide dozens, hundreds or even thousands of virtual servers without building hundreds or thousands of individual servers.

Instead of reliance on numerous individual servers the virtual servers tap into the virtually unlimited computing power of many very powerful servers grouped together via a network to form what is known as a cloud. New resources can be added to the cloud without downtime and servers within the cloud can be removed for upgrades or maintenance without users of the service even noticing.

As a remote user of cloud hosting the virtualization process is invisible to you. You simply connect via SSH, VNC, PC Anywhere, Telnet, FTP or another protocol and configure the server as you would a traditional physical server. Instances of servers can be backed up, duplicated, downgraded and upgraded with just a click without the downtime required to do the same procedures on a physical server.

vServerCenter.com is a leading provider of cloud server hosting services. By utilizing the latest technologies in cloud computing and server virtualization including VMware Hosting, vServerCenter.com can provide significant savings, better eBusiness and IT services, and a higher level of reliability.

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