Do you prefare Virtual servers or Physical servers what are the advantages and disadvantages for both of them ?

Cost: Virtualization save money while buying physical server cost lot of money.

Performance: Virtualization hardware is getting faster and faster each year, you have more resources being used with virtualization. Performance needs for an application should to be addressed on a case by case basis.

Many dedicated servers are only using about20% of their computing capacity. This is a waste of usable resource and also one of the main reason companies are looking for virtualization

Managing Time:  Many of the virtualization products have advanced management tools that help you to monitor and review information quicker across more servers. Dedicated hosting solutions are more complex due to their hardware separation.

Migration:   Migration is easy on in virtualization as many products come with software that helps you migrate applications from your older dedicated servers to new virtual servers. This means that upgrades to your environment can be much easier as long as you stay with similar virtualization products.

Disaster Recovery: Most virtualization software comes with a number of features that may increase server up-time. If one virtual server fails, it will come up instantly on another machine. Load balancing is also easier. Many packages also come with their own data backup solutions such as 'snapshots' to protect data. In case of Physical server, we have to opt other backup and recovery options.

Point of Failure: If you have15 virtual servers on a single piece of hardware and if that goes down, it’s not good. Minimizing these risks may require additional hardware like redundant physical servers and SANS. This adds more equipment and cost which are the exact items you are trying to reduce.

We can't let our entire business shutting down due to a single failure. With dedicated servers we know that a single server failure rarely takes down everything. Virtualization increases the risk of a major event when you loose a single server. One of virtualizations selling point is the ability to load balance servers easily. We can say that the separation of services could be a good thing for many different configurations

For me, I prefer using using Virtual Servers.

But I'll talk about the advantages and disadvantages of each from my point of view.

1. Virtual Servers:

A. Advantages:

* Low Cost.

* Easier Expand and migration of network.

B. Disadvantages:

* Single point of failure in case no backup physical server occurs.

* Shared resources, thus needs powerful physical server to run multiple VMs properly.

2. Physical Servers:

A. Advantages:

* Dedicated Hardware for each server.

* More resiliant to faults, since only one service is hosted on a single server

B. Disadvantages:

* High Cost, since multiple of servers are needed.

* Difficult to manage in large environments.

* Cooling is required

So, in all cases, you will need to have at least one physical server. Then, depending on your design and requirements, you can install VMs on it, or purchase more physical servers.

I Prefer Virtual Servers over Physical Server.Only need one Good Configured Physical Server and we can run many virtual servers on it. Backing up of Virtual Servers is very easy by using Snapshot. So evenif something goes wrong when we do patching or do configuration changes, we can restore to the earlier snapshot..

One big disadvantage for both is the failure issu, in virtualization if you have a failure hardware your backup may not help you and it will cost you money to have new hardware. and in case of hardware servers if you have a software failure you need to reinstall and restore and it will cost you time and money.

in conclusion based on the scenario you have, you will decide which type to use, for me till now no need for virtualization.

virtual server are better than physical for alot of resones as following:-

1-  Less Cost

2- Dynamic Performance with accelatration tools speed up performance 

3- Single point of administration with command-line .    

4- Easy Migration from physical to virtual 

5- Easy and verious ways of Disaster Recovery 

6- Point of Failure : every physical server should have redundant server but on virtual only the main physical server and a redundant  server with load balancing tech. at most causes so face two issues point of fail and improve performance.

For todays IT infrastructre it is necessary to deploy virtualize envoirnment because there are lots benefits for instance it is scaleable.we can increased or decease hardware features when machine is up and runing there is no need to shutdown and the Important aspect is we can install as many server application on single hard ware server machine.At the same time we liberty of taking server backup and if there is any failure we simply virtual machine moved from one hardware to another hardware machine.Finally it's All depents upon the organization scenario what actual their requirement either they wants Physical or virtualzed.

For only one server, it may be better using virtual one(Also depend on the business and criticality of it)

For the whole Environment, It should be mixed based on the business need and related designe

Regards,,,,

Ahmed

Virtual environement provided that it is virtualized on physical environment with High Availbility, Fault Tolerance and Scalability on physical level. Virtual environment is provide more high availability, fault tolerance, disaster recover, data protection, scalability, optimization, better resource management and utilization than physical infrstructure.

Hi All,

I think i agree with Islam Nadim; but for me, i will combine both.

I will have a virtualize computing in one physical server with another virtualized physical redundant server.

I thinks  virtual server has more advantages compartively  physical server. Because

Virtual server easy to manage. If need any add, remove or modify virtual Pc’s we can do it within seconds. Need minimum hardware requirement, Reduce number of PC cost, Increase resource utilization, Reduce cost of space requirements, less IT staff , power and hardware, easier to restore failed. Finally reducing your PC hardware means diminishing your electric equipment’s, which will definitely reduce carbon emissions in office. So, become green with virtualization.