Subtitles of the Movie

One of the hottest buzz words you'll hear, and one of the coolest technologies going on in the server world right now is Virtualization. And you're going to hear about this a lot because we now have Virtualization as part of the network operating system built into Windows Server 2008. Now you've actually had this since a late service pack version, if you will, I think it was Windows Server 2003 R2. But you could get Virtualization as part of that package, but Windows Server 2008 is the first one released with it as part of the operating system. What I want to do here is just to show you a real quick visual about what Virtualization is, so that you'll know what's going on and we'll go into more detail a little bit later on in the course. But what has happened in the past, the very recent past is as network utilization, as we've grown more and more dependent on computer technology, then what has happened is that there's been a growth in the number of servers, or server farms have gotten larger, and one of the things I mentioned very early on in very early on in this course is that Microsoft has determined that administrators are spending as much as 70 percent of their time patching, applying service packs, doing various pieces of maintenance that really doesn't help the underlying basics of their job that much, it's kind of just protecting them from problems, if that makes sense. And so, what they found out is that if you have say 8 or 10 servers in your server route then, you have 8 or 10 different hard disc arrays or hard discs to deal with, you have 8 or 10 display adaptors, you have 8 or 10 of everything that you have to maintain, this is like having 8 cars, and so this is obviously become an issue. Now, with the increase in technologies and abilities with RAM and with processor strength, Virtualization is where instead of having maybe you know, 5 of these servers, we now have 1 of these servers and in memory on that server, we may have 4 other servers running. So really, it's just exactly the way it sounds. We have 1 machine, 1 box, but we have multiple servers running in a virtual environment on that machine. Now, if you put a bunch of administrators in a room and asked a question, there will be a fight, which is better? One really big powerful server or 5 separate slightly less powerful servers? Now, the thing you'll always get is, well, I'd rather have 5 servers because if I just have 1 server with 4 other servers running virtually in memory, then that means that if this 1 server goes down, all of these services go down. And that is exactly right, good answer, however, we can do some things for example, we can do a complete backup on this server and have a warm standby ready to go. Then, now for the price of 2 pieces of hardware, and a little bit of software licensing, we have a very reliable, very quickly crossed over backup solution and so instead of having, you look at the alternative on that would be to have 5 here and 5 here, that's 10 physical servers to maintain and take care of. With Virtualization, we have 2 boxes that can run 4 virtual servers and memory on them. Don't mean to beat a dead horse here but I want you to get a picture of this, exactly what's happening. There are products out there, VMware is probably the hottest one out there right now, Microsoft continues to improve their products, Virtual Server 2005, they have Virtual PC 2007, and really, what you see is these various operating systems running in a small window, but they're running in memory on the machine and they are sharing, they're all sharing the same hardware. So, that's what virtualization is, I just wanted to give you a mental image of it because you're going to hear an awful lot about it, it's everywhere out there now, and it works and it does a great job, so that's what virtualization is and again, we'll dig into it a little bit more later on in the course.