OACS offers a fee-based Virtual Server Hosting (VSH) service to faculty/staff in the College of BSOS for the support of disciplines within the College. Server virtualization is a technology which will benefit a department needing the flexibility that owning their own server would provide, without the overhead of co-location and maintenance. Running a physical server requires having appropriate support infrastructure and personnel, taking physical security precautions, performing regular hardware upgrades and maintenance, and responding to hardware failures. OACS virtual server hosting service offers Departments virtual servers on a highly available Hyper-V multi-node cluster running on fully supported hardware actively monitored to align with customer requirements and SLA at a fraction of the cost of independently purchasing, housing, and maintaining a physical server.
Key advantages of OACS VSH:
Enterprise Solutions at a Lower Cost:
VSH is built on enterprise caliber servers, networking, and storage on Hyper-V following vendor best practices.
Reduced Personnel Expenses:
Using VSH allows units to refocus staff time on the mission of the organization, rather than working on hardware acquisition, maintenance, and support.
Scalability/Flexibility over Physical Equipment:
Since there is no direct link between virtual machines and underlying hardware, OACS can proactively move a VM (Virtual Machine) instance during scheduled hardware maintenance and employ OS upgrades during our monthly downtime maintenance window (generally the Friday after the 2nd Tuesday of each month). You incur no additional expense when OACS upgrades it’s backend hardware, or the software required for server availability.
Increased Availability and Performance:
OACS VSH runs on our Enterprise hardware. Housed in the OACS data center, this hardware features (10G) network and power redundancy, along with scalability. The OACS data center features fully redundant HVAC, and UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supplies), all supported by an integrated generator in the event of a power outage.
Contributes to Going Green:
Virtual servers use less power and cooling which supports University sustainability goals and improves resource utilization in the data center.
Quick Deployment:
Virtual machines can be deployed in hours instead of days to weeks because there is no need to purchase, install, or configure hardware.
Not all applications are well-suited for virtualization
The following list is an example of applications which may not necessarily be best suited for a virtualized environment:
- Computation and/or transaction intensive applications
- Applications that require extremely large amounts of storage
- Large database servers or data warehouse applications
- Applications that require resources beyond the limits in the OACS virtual server offerings
OACS can assist in reviewing a particular application or service to determine if it’s suitable for virtualization
Please note that some vendor products are not supported and as such will not operate in Hyper-V environments. Prior to subscribing, we recommend that you consult with your software vendor to ensure your selected applications will operate in a virtualized environment.
