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Server Virtualization Stable and secure There is a lot of buzz in the industry these days about server virtualization. Virtualization is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute. Today’s powerful x86 computer hardware was originally designed to run only a single operating system and a single application, but virtualization breaks that bond, making it possible to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the same time. FTP Today has been using OS virtualization technology for years! OS virtualization virtualizes servers on the operating system (kernel) layer. This method of virtualization creates isolated partitions, or virtual environments (VEs) on a single physical server. At the base resides a standard host operating system. Next is the virtualization layer with a proprietary file system and a kernel service abstraction layer that ensure isolation and security of resources between different virtual environments. The virtualization layer makes each virtual environment appear as a standalone server. Finally, the virtual environment itself houses the FTP server application or workload. A VE is a tightly isolated container that runs its own FTP server application as if it were a physical computer. While VEs can share the physical resources of a single computer, they remain completely isolated from each other as if they were separate physical machines. If, for example, there are twenty VEs on a single physical server and one of the virtual servers crashes, the other nineteen virtual servers remain available. Isolation is an important reason why the availability and security of hosting FTP servers running in a virtual environment (as with FTP Today) is far superior to FTP hosts running in a traditional, non-virtualized system (as with our competitors). |
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