Enhancing Your Infrastructure's Agility
Welcome back to our series on reducing cloud costs through a DevOps-Enabled, Automated IT Infrastructure. In our last post, we discussed the first step towards this transformation: signing up for an account at OVH.com, a Dedicated Managed Server hosting company. Today, we're moving on to the next step – installing a Virtualization Hypervisor on every rented machine.
In the realm of IT, a hypervisor is software that creates and manages virtual machines (VMs). It allows one physical machine to host multiple virtual machines, each with its own operating system. This ability to partition a single physical machine into multiple virtual ones is known as virtualization. It brings agility to your setup, letting you quickly create new environments, isolate applications, and optimize your hardware usage.
When choosing a Virtualization Hypervisor, you have several options, including VMware, KVM, and Xen to name a few. While VMware is a popular choice, its licensing fee can be high, which may not align with your cost reduction goals.
That's why I recommend KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), an open-source hypervisor used by major companies like Amazon. For a KVM distribution, I specifically suggest Proxmox. It's free, open-source, has near feature parity with VMware, and is growing in popularity due to its robust functionality and ease of use.
Learning to navigate virtualization hypervisors can seem daunting, but tools like our Bubbles Orchestration Software System can assist with setup, configuration, and major administrative tasks. Both Proxmox and VMware offer comprehensive documentation, video tutorials, and support.
By installing a hypervisor on your rented bare metal machines, you'll be setting up a solid foundation for automation and easy operation of all your instances and applications. This step will allow you to bring the agility of the cloud to your own infrastructure, providing the flexibility and efficiency you need to streamline operations and reduce costs.
In our next blog post, we'll discuss Step 3 – setting up a cluster of Hypervisors in "high-availability" mode. This configuration will ensure that if one Hypervisor experiences an unexpected outage, the remaining Hypervisors can promptly take over, minimizing potential downtime.
Stay tuned as we continue our step-by-step journey towards efficient cloud cost management. Remember, each step you take is bringing you closer to a more cost-effective, agile, and efficient IT infrastructure. Let's keep moving forward!
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