Virtualization Platforms

Logicworks views virtualization, like cloud computing it underpins, as one tool among many for addressing complex computing requirements. But, among tools, it is one of the most powerful and genuinely revolutionary in its impact on reliability, availability and serviceability.

Virtualization is not, however, new. It first appeared in IBM's CM/CMS operating system for mainframes in 1967 and has continually evolved until it met its perfect match in today's highly-dense and affordable multi-core servers.

We bring the same focus on high-availability and scalability to virtualization that we bring to all other aspects of our services. All virtualization solutions are based on no single point of failure, with physical redundancy at every layer of the architecture, from hypervisor to switches and firewalls, to storage transport, to even storage itself. Backing storage for virtualization employs synchronous block-level replication, to ensure that each write is fully committed to physically discrete storage devices.

Logicworks employs two different virtualization platforms in its production environment -- VMware ESX and Kernel-based Virtual Machine, known as KVM and offers virtualization solutions on a fully-private, shared-SAN, and public configurations. All Logicworks virtualization platforms benefit from true virtualization instead of paravirtualization, used by Amazon and most other Xen-based public cloud providers.

Logicworks recognizes that virtualization and hypervisors are only part of the equation, and that the management framework, which Logicworks offers native access to for both VMware and KVM, is necessary to unlock all the capabilities that virtualization offers.

  • Live migration, where virtual machines can migrate from physical server to physical server with no downtime;
  • Snapshotting of virtual machines including memory state;
  • Template-based virtual machine deployment;
  • Easy and inexpensive development server deployment and management;
  • Automatic redistribution of virtual machines to least-loaded hosts.

VMware is the market leading enterprise virtualization platform, and provides the most complete management environment. Logicworks also supports KVM, the emerging open source community standard. Either platform can provide almost instantaneous capacity on demand and significant improvements in reliability, availability and serviceability over bare metal environments.

Virtualization is usually only one component of a representative Logicworks-designed architecture, which typically includes dedicated network devices, such as a VPN endpoint or IDS appliance, bare metal servers for databases or other resource-intensive applications. Logicworks remains committed not just to using the right tool for the job right now, but continuing to develop and deploy new tools to solve even more complex problems of the future.