Networking: A Beginner’s Guide Fifth Edition- P78:I have run into many people over the years who have gained good even impressive working knowledge of PCs, operating systems, applications, and common problems and solutions. Many of these people are wizards with desktop computers. | Chapter 23 Introduction to Virtualization 367 Simplified maintenance When you put a lot of applications on a single server operating system it becomes difficult to maintain each individual application without affecting the others. For example if you upgrade an application and need to restart the server you must restart the whole server affecting all of the other jobs it may be doing. With a virtual machine setup you can easily restart individual virtual machines without affecting how the other machines operate and without interrupting their services. Introducing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Microsoft now offers Hyper-V technology within Windows Server 2008 64-bit edition at no additional charge. Hyper-V is a full-featured hypervisor that runs within the Windows Server 2008 environment and allows you to create and manage virtual machines within Windows Server 2008. This provides an easy way for a Windows 2008 Server-based organization to easily start using virtualization. Microsoft s Hyper-V supports a single host operating system of course Windows Server 2008 64-bit. It supports the following guest operating systems Windows Server 2008 64- and 32-bit Windows Server 2003 64- and 32-bit Windows Server 2000 SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 64- and 32-bit Windows Vista 64- and 32-bit Windows XP Professional 64- and 32-bit These are the supported operating systems. Note that variants such as other distributions of Linux may and often do work perfectly fine. Microsoft is dramatically expanding its virtualization efforts but as of the publication of this book they are not as mature as VMware offerings which are described next. Using VMware Virtualization Products Currently VMware has the most mature virtualization infrastructure available. VMware has a wide variety of products designed to help companies of any size manage virtual machines. And two powerful virtualization products are offered for free VMware Server which is a full virtualization product designed to install onto
