IT Technologies

Virtualization offers huge benefits in flexibility, cost-effectiveness and eco-friendliness. However, some design choices need to be made towards deploying Active Directory Domain Controllers in virtual environments. Some of these choices are general choices, but some of them apply to Hyper-V enabled environments specifically.

When deploying an Active Directory environment, either for test or production purposes, either virtual or physical, be sure to deploy at least two Domain Controllers per Active Directory domain, whenever possible. When either Domain Controller fails you don't lose your Active Directory information and any applications, services and users depending on it can continue to operate, unless specifically pointed to.

   

Virtualization, in computing, is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, a storage device or network resources.

Virtualization can be viewed as part of an overall trend in enterprise IT that includes autonomic computing, a scenario in which the IT environment will be able to manage itself based on perceived activity, and utility computing, in which computer processing power is seen as a utility that clients can pay for only as needed. The usual goal of virtualization is to centralize administrative tasks while improving scalability and work loads.

Virtualization is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources.

Hardware

1. Full virtualization: Almost complete simulation of the actual hardware to allow software, typically a guest operating system, to run unmodified
2. Partial virtualization: Some but not all of the target environment is simulated. Some guest software, therefore, may need modifications to run in this virtual environment.
3. Paravirtualization: A hardware environment is not simulated; however, the guest software are executed in their own isolated domains, as if they are running on a separate system. Guest software need to be specifically modified to run in this environment.

[edit]Software

• Operating system-level virtualization, hosting of multiple virtualized environments within a single OS instance
• Application virtualization and Workspace virtualization, the hosting of individual applications in an environment separated from the underlying OS

[edit]Memory

• Memory virtualization, aggregating RAM resources from networked systems into a single memory pool
• Virtual memory, giving an application program the impression that it has contiguous working memory, isolating it from the underlying physical memory implementation

[edit]Storage

• Storage virtualization, the process of completely abstracting logical storage from physical storage
• Distributed file system

[edit]Data

• Data virtualization, the presentation of data as an abstract layer, independent of underlying database systems, structures and storage
• Database virtualization, the decoupling of the database layer, which lies between the storage and application layers within the application stack

[edit]Network

• Desktop virtualization, the remote display, hosting or manipulation of a graphical computer environment (desktop)
• Network virtualization, creation of a virtualized network addressing space within or across network subnets

Five Thousandth 10GbE Nexus Customer, Seven Millionth Nexus Switching Port, and Almost Four Thousand UCS Customers Demonstrate Data Center Virtualization, Unified Fabric and Open NX-OS Leadership.

John McCool, senior vice president and general manager, data center, switching and services group, Cisco.