Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

Glo Hosted Servers

Here is a little look at how we do our servers here at Glo Networks. We recently upgraded the hardware of our hosted server to speed up the system and offer greater capacity for extra virtual servers.

Break down of the system -

Hosted server running Windows Server 2003 x64 and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 running 3 virtual servers

1x Windows Server 2008 Terminal Server
1x Windows Server 2003 R2 running Active directory, Exchange 2003 and file server
1x Windows Server 2003 R2 Web Server

When moving to the new server hardware we needed to take all the virtual servers over from the old server, this is a great example of how well virtual servers can be great disaster recovery with the only difference being the servers would be restored from a backup.

We backup our virtual servers to another data centre every night, in this case we are actually moving the servers from the old server to the new server, being in a data centre this was very quick as the speeds of a data centre are far greater than any normal business internet.

Once we had finished setting up routing on the new host server and installing Virtual Server 2005 R2 we then mounted the virtual servers and powered them on, our entire system was then up and running.

This process took a total of 5 hours, this shows how Virtual Server can greatly reduce down time should a disaster happen or if a hardware upgrade is required, it also reduces power usage by using one powerful physical server to run multiple virtual servers.

If you would like more information on virtual servers or hosted servers please contact us, we will be happy to help.