Those who decide to create and conduct their own projects on the Internet, sooner or later faces the issue of renting disk space. The advantages of buying hosting are obvious: the machine works around the clock, connected to a high-speed Internet channel, etc. But what server in this situation choose: virtual or physical? And what is the principal difference between them then? Let's deal with.

We study the concept

The first thing to be done in comparing the services of various types is to figure out what they represent:

• Physical (Dedicated) The server is a separate machine on which only your resource (or resources) files are located, and the owner of which receives full access to it and on the software, and at the hardware level.
• Virtual (VDS) Server is one of the many emulators placed on one computer. It is functionally practically completely copied by the physical server, but its owners have to share the car with other coarters whose number (depending on the power of the iron) can be measured by hundreds.

We analyze the advantages

The next step approaching us to the answer to the question "What to choose" is a comparison of characteristics. After all, it is from them that will depend on how efficient the resource will function. For clarity, place the results of the comparison in the table:

We formulate conclusions

So what server to choose as a result: physical or virtual. Even now, when we know the "pros" and "minuses" of both options, there is no unambiguous answer. All solve personal tastes and preferences of the future tenant.

Physical servers - the choice of those who are calmer to realize that somewhere "there" stands a real computer, which there is no need to share with any other. They are also interested in those owners whose Internet resources require the installation on the Specific Hardware / Software server. Virtual machines will ask for those who are not used to overpay for services. Among their users are prevailed by people, which first of all, estimate the reliability of the site and the mobility of its replacement.

Now we know what the key differences between servers of various types are taken. And which one in the end chose you?

Colleagues, glad to inform you that on June 26 of this year it is planned to meet the VMware community, in Moscow.

In addition, we try to make this meeting is easy to communicate - so that it is possible to discuss what and how it is done at colleagues, it happens very useful. And from the pair of three hundreds of coming (including coming from other cities) usually manage to find a suitable interlocutor .

The meeting is free for participants, registration is required (registration form below).

Important! - We took into account the experience and reviews of last year, and now we have drastically reduced the number of sponsors and sponsorship reports, which were most complaints.

The program, as usual, is still in the process of settling, but there is already a previous understanding who and what he wants to tell:

Must be Anton Zhbankov. Last year's report "Processor Planner VMware ESXI 5.1" is unambiguously recognized "the most shredder and therefore an interesting" report of the last meeting (really, I am at work I meet with a person, we communicate we communicate, go to informal themes and here he "But you know such Anton, he An Ats report did that year ... ").
This time, swallowing should increase, without prejudice to utility.

I will add more details closer to the consolidation of arrangements, briefly:
-) Details and experience with Virtual San;
-) Discussion and discussion led by a person introducing "clouds" with their own hands.
-) the rest is specified

• Dedicated Server, or physical server, is the most productive and expensive hosting service. Rent a highlighted server will be an excellent solution for owners of commercial sites, corporate resources, game servers and complex web applications.
• Unlike Shared Hosting and VPS, when using which you have to share resources with other users, with Dedicated you will receive at the disposal all the power provided within the service. Therefore, the placement of the website on the server guarantees a high degree of security: you do not divide the server with other sites that can be vulnerable to hacker attacks.
• Rent a highlighted Web server and storage (data storage system) in the data center (Data Processing Center) is an order of a very productive stationary computer in a Windows or Linux data center with a special set of programs for a certain period. We will provide the server by a quick connection with the Internet at a speed of up to 10 Gb / s, a constant connection to electricity and professional technical support that will help cope with hardware and software difficulties.
• Another reason for the rental of server equipment to the site is modern and protected data centers, which contain dedicated physical servers Dedicated - Data centers are located in Moscow and are considered among the most reliable in Russia. Data centers use uninterrupted power supply, fire extinguishing and air conditioning systems. This will ensure continuous operation of servers and your projects.

Selected Servers based on Intel Xeon processor

• On the site site you have several options to select the optimal server configuration:
• 1. Order a ready-made server. With the help of filters, you can choose the appropriate machine under your budget and needs.
  2. Use the configurator and independently select the components for the server.
  3. Send us an application and order a unique server configuration.
• The advantages of the rental services of Dedicated servers include the provision of complete freedom in the choice of installed software, as well as control over the equipment: the bandwidth of the tire, memory and disk. The rental price of a dedicated server per month depends on its parameters and characteristics.
• You can rent a dedicated server to the data center (data center) on the basis of Intel Xeon processors: E, E3, E5, GOLD, SILVER, W in various configurations with SSD, SATA or SAS discs, depending on how powerful equipment you need.
• How much is the server rental for the site? The price of such a service is usually higher in comparison with the VPS and virtual hosting. Pay attention to the "Cheap Servers" section: You can buy a dedicated Dedicated servers for the site in the data center (Data Center) on the tariffs with the lowest per month.
• A highlighted lease server is a reliable, fast and safe hosting, which will give a lot of opportunities for companies whose information systems, sites and projects need round-the-clock uninterrupted work, large computing resources and disk for storing and reserving information.

In this article, we explain the main differences between the physical and virtual server from the client's point of view. We will also try to debunk on the way some myths. Let's hope that it will help individuals and companies to make more suspended solutions when buying a server.

Physical server (so-called dedicated server)

The physical server is, as it says the name, server (physical computer), which runs the operating system, like Windows, or Linux, as on any other computer. Physical servers are almost everywhere, desktop computers, with a large number of improvements that do not have desktop PCs showing things like backup power supplies, RAID controllers, multiple network cards, etc. Physical servers are larger in size with much more powerful components in general. All of them require a separate place in the server rack. Most servers also have two or more physical processors and each with several nuclei.

Virtual server (VPS or otherwise virtual machine - VM)

In order for everyone to understand the concept of virtual servers, we must explain a little about how virtualization works.

Hypervin - Operating system or software in an operating system that simulates a computer environment in which virtual machines are created and running.

This means that the hypervisor may be either a separate software (type 2 of the hypervisor) or may act as a hypervisor of the entire operating system (type 1 - hypervisor known as "Bare Metal Hypervisor" or "Embedded Hypervisor"). Examples of 2 types of hypervisors include Oracle VirtualBox, VMware Workstation and Microsoft VirtualPC. Examples of the 1st type of hypervisors include VMware ESXI (VSphere), Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, XEN and others. The latter is the type 1 of hypervisor - all this can be set as well as the operating system is installed on the server. When the hypervisor is installed on the server, its resources are evenly distributed among the virtual machines, so one server can serve hundreds of virtual machines.

After creating, the virtual machine behaves the same way as any other computer, you can enable it and load the operating system, as well as on any other computer. The operating system thinks it is performed on a physical computer. Each virtual machine has its own so-called virtual hardware. VM has its own processor, hard disk and network interface. This means that the default virtual machine does not know that this is a virtual machine, if there is no software on it, which will detect, with the help of other means.

Physical virtual servers, pros and cons

Now, when we understand the concept of virtual servers, we can make a general comparison as from the client's point of view.

Physical disadvantages of Server

• Much more expensive than a virtual server (VPS)
  Just because of the resources required to start and maintain the physical server, they are much more expensive.
• Harder to manage
  Physical servers are generally much more difficult to manage. This is especially true with recovery in case of failures. Just like on any other machine, there will be a day when because of a number of reasons, the server fails. In these cases, recovery from backups is a real nightmare, since the server must be restored from zero to another (new) server, and then the data must be restored from backups. For critical manufacturing systems, it means at least 8 or more hours of idle. To prevent this, the company creates clusters from two or more servers, but, of course, it will only increase costs.
• Worsescalable
  Practically it is impossible to update the server without additional downtime. In addition, it is worth noting that future updates for a dedicated server must be taken into account when ordering a server. Otherwise, the update can lead to the creation of a completely new server. Instead of bringing unplanned service migration and, thus, unplanned downtime of the service.

Physical pro Server

• More powerful than virtual server
  This is the only reason why you must order a dedicated server. So, let's see if we have a physical server with 8 GB of RAM and a dual-core processor, and make an accurate copy of the virtual machine with the same parameters, the physical server will provide much better results. This is because the physical server will not suffer from bottlenecks that are present on virtual machines.

Virtual Servers - Cons

• Lower performance compared to selected servers
  As already explained earlier, the virtual machines offer a little less productivity than physical servers because of a number of reasons. Basically, the reason is a bottleneck that between Vm and the hypervisor itself. In most cases, it does not matter, because this deficiency can be easily solved for cooking clusters of three or more virtual servers. Finally, the SSD disk technology added a significant performance of virtual machines.

Virtual pro Server

• Cheaper than dedicated server
  Virtual machines located on physical servers can serve hundreds of virtual machines. Resources that can then be distributed among virtual machines and therefore virtual machines occupy very few resources on the parent server, which significantly reduces their cost.
• Simplified management
  Basically, this is the greatest advantage of the virtual machines that they have in front of the physical servers. The virtual machine is much easier to manage than the physical server. For example, when installing a physical server, you must perform a major version of the server hardware checks and its peripheral devices and make sure that they work correctly. If something does not work, as conceived, additional drivers must be installed and configured. When the virtual machine is deployed, the virtual machine receives its drivers from the parent host, thus, the virtual machine is ready for operation immediately. And this is only one example of many.
• Simplified backup and recovery
  On each physical server requires a manifest to make it configurations, applications and what should or should not be backup for virtual machines, backup copies are made from the entire virtual machine. When there is a failure for any reason, these backups are ready to be restored immediately and in general VM is restored instead. Obviously, in such cases, the downtime is significantly reduced.
• Scalability and flexibility
  There is no downtime for resources (plans) of updates with a large number of RAM, processor power, disk space, etc.
• Perfect choice for any web service
  Is this a small blog or a big social network with thousands of visitors per day, the VPS system can be easily adjusted in accordance with the load. If necessary, more VPS can quickly and easily be added to the cluster serving various aspects of the web service.

So a virtual or physical server is needed for my business?

Short answer - 99.9% Time, VPS is the best choice.

Virtualization as technology these days is getting better and better. Almost every company in the world has adopted virtualization to some level. If you do not need the real power of the allotted server and you also have a large business budget, there is no other reason why you should not choose VPS. VPS system, especially if based on SSD, fast, secure and easy to manage.

Watching suitable hosting for your project or platform for business automation, sooner or later a question appears, probably already becoming classic: what server to rent - virtual or physical? You can call this question technical, but you can do personal preferences, but in any case the answer will have to find and preferably correct.

Let's start with the fact that we need a car capable of satisfying both the increased requirements of the Web project to resources and productivity and the need for maximum equipment control. These tasks decide:

Physical server.(Dedicated) - an independent and self-sufficient unit of equipment that opens in front of its owner a full range of control on the hardware and programmatic level.

Virtual server(VDS). It is created directly on physical equipment, where each virtual machine consists of a specific resource pool. The VDS functionality emulates the work of the physical server and does it very successfully.

The difference between virtualization and iron

When selecting any server, such characteristics are important as the frequency of the processor, the amount of RAM and disk space. But the ease of use, management, reliability and cost is plays an equally important role. Compare both options within these indicators.

Configuration

• Dedicated:When ordering physical equipment, it is necessary to correctly calculate the requirements for the server for a comfortable work of the project "Just enough". If you wish to upgrade the piece of iron, you can additionally order RAM or add hard drives. If the project has grown greatly, you can migrate to a more powerful server or take additional.
• VDS: Virtualization is popular due to simple and convenient scalability. You can not take the server "with a reserve", since the increase or decrease in the power pool occurs extremely simple and quickly. In addition to RAM and disk space, you can also change the processor power.

Control

• Dedicated:The physical server is posted in the data center and to administer it, settings, rebuts, etc. Remote access to KVM or IPMI equipment is required. The equipment is under the total control of its tenant, which is free to produce any technical work on the machine.
• VDS:Virtual selected machine (not to be confused with software virtualization) Allows you to install your own software and change system parameters, as well as on iron equipment. For your personal request, you can install the server control panel.

Reliability

• Dedicated:The physical equipment tends to obstruct and wear out that with a long service can lead to the failure of its components. In such a situation, it is possible simple for the period of definition and fixing the problem.
• VDS:Virtual resources can not break or out. Even if there will be any problems on the blade server, something "flies" or break, the virtual machine is much easier to migrate to backup resources, and this is not noticeable for the user.

Cost

• Dedicated:It is necessary to take into account future potential growth in the resource requirements and server performance. "Jump" between physical machines is sufficiently discomfort and it is difficult, and the fee for unused capacity is unprofitable.
• VDS:The owner of the virtual machine can only pay for the resources consumed, scalating the server for the stages of the project development. If the project is large-scale, then virtualization on cheap products (virtualization platforms) will be a fidget iron analogue, but the quality of the service may be doubtful.

What to choose: Dedicated or VDS?

Physical and virtual servers are equally well suited for reliable and easy operation of complex applications and large-scale projects. Each type of hosting has its pros and cons.

Virtual machines are reliable in operation and easier in scaling, but may not be suitable for the implementation of specific projects requiring special software or hardware.

Despite its cons, iron equipment as a full-fledged computer at a wide range of users causes more confidence. But it is rather a well-established stereotype that goes into the past. Physical equipment is often chosen due to considerations that somewhere in the data center there is an absolutely real server.

In any case, whatever the server you choose, it is necessary to clearly understand the goals that it should decide, the time period to implement these goals and the forecast of the development of the project. Based on these indicators and needs, you can choose the option suitable for you.