This is one debate that will continue to raise its head time and time again over the coming years, as people look for the best solution for their site/application. As Dediserve offers both these options we’d like to think were well placed to offer out thoughts.

At Dediserve we definitely see virtual servers as the most progressive option of the two and the one that will eventually overtake the traditional dedicated server hardware model, there are several reasons for this:

• Data centres are running out of space
• This is driving the cost of data centre space higher as it becomes a premium resource
• The cost of power continues to rise due to instability in the middle east and the threat of “peak oil”
• Cooling factors come into these costs as the more physical machines needed the higher amount of cooling also needed
• Traditional servers far from fully utilized on by most applications/sites leaving alot of waste of resources

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We here in Dediserve are huge fans of Xen, after all our whole virtualized platform is built on it. However we did throughly investigate all the existing virtualization technologies currently on the market when we went to build out our own platform.

So to save you the same hassle i will outline below our feelings on each technology we looked at both good and bad.

Xen

Pro’s

• Using Paravirtualisation technology It allows several guest operating systems to be executed on the same computer hardware concurrently
• You can physically reboot the node with no affect to any other users on the same harrdware
• You can install and set-up Iptables
• You do not share resources and are guaranteed resources
• Its Free

Con’s

• Guanteed resources means having less users on each machine
• Not as mature as some of the other commercial virtualisation technologies

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