Virtual Machines Hosting

IT Services (ITS) provide the capability for hosting Virtual Machines within its Virtual Hosting Infrastructure. This is a very cost effective way of obtaining a dedicated Windows or Linux server; for environmental reasons and space constraints, we do not offer a hosting service for physical servers.

Various configurations of server can be provided, with disk space optimised to actual requirements rather than being determined by physical disk sizes. Single processor servers can be readily upgraded to dual processor; similarly, the memory and disk space allocated can be expanded on demand.

Two environments are available: a production environment and a test/development environment.

Production Environment

The virtual machine is specified as a High Availability server which has the following characteristics:

  • the entire encapsulated server environment is hosted on one of the SANs and replicated in real-time to the second SAN
  • in the event of failure of the physical server on which the virtual machine is running, the virtual machine will automatically be restarted on an alternative physical host without subsequent loss of performance
  • in the event of loss of an entire server room, the virtual machine will be manually restarted on a physical host in the alternative server room albeit with some subsequent degradation in performance
  • Backups are undertaken on a daily basis

Test / Development Environment

This is a lower cost alternative for virtual servers which are not critical to day-to-day operations and which has the following characteristics:

  • in the event of failure of the physical server on which the virtual machine is running, subsequent availability of the virtual machine will be dependent on the return to operation of its physical host
  • in the event of loss of a significant portion of the production environment, the physical machine resources used to sustain the virtual test environment will be redeployed to support the production environment; the test environment will remain unavailable until such time as the full production environment has been restored
  • Backups are taken on a weekly basis

This service is chargeable, see ‘ITS Chargeable Services’

To request this service go to the service catalogue pages in our Self Service portal and search ‘virtual machine’, then click ‘Request’.