Cloud computing is quickly becoming a standard practice among many Information Technology firms. Recently SilenceIT has moved to a Cloud infrastructure, to lower energy costs, increase server performance and save valuable server rack space. Where many servers and systems once resided, only a fraction of the hardware remains, yet it is still able to handle all of the services and jobs the previous hardware did, as well as allowing room for future growth. These new Cloud servers are called “Hypervisors.” These systems create virtualized hardware containers, allowing us to install and maintain many types of servers from Windows to Linux and everything in between. Having the ability to run several operating systems, of different types, all on the same hardware, at the same time, is quite a powerful concept. Citrix XenServer and OpenFiler make our cloud infrastructure possible and have been rock-solid and perform wonderfully.
Citrix XenServer is an Enterprise class, cloud proven and FREE Hypervisor software solution. XenSever is based upon an industry standard virtualization platform called Xen. Citrix packages XenServer with a terrific management program called XenCenter that allows you to install, update, and manage your cloud servers. Running virtual machines can be seamlessly moved between 2 Hypervisors with no downtime whatsoever. This allows for easy maintenance of the Hypervisor machines. If one of the Hypervisors needs to be brought down for maintenance, the virtual machines can be migrated to another one for the duration of the down-time, then migrated back once it is complete. This featured is offered at no cost with Citrix XenServer. XenServer uses “Resilient distributed management architecture.” Each of the Hypervisor machines has enough information to run the entire cloud independently. If one Hypervisor fails, the other Hypervisors in the Cloud are able to take over without any special configuration changes. Storage for the virtual machines is located on a shared repository running on OpenFiler. Each Hypervisor has complete access to the entire catalog of virtual machines in the cloud. For more information on Citrix XenServer visit: http://www.citrix.com
OpenFiler is an open-source network storage appliance with a powerful set of features and a robust web GUI. SilenceIT uses OpenFiler as a shared storage repository for our Cloud Hypervisors. OpenFilers “10 minute installation process,” ease of use, and fantastic feature set made it an obvious choice for SilenceIT’s Cloud Infrastructure. For more information on OpenFiler visit: http://www.openfiler.com
