The more we talk with IT professionals, the more we find virtualized computing environments whose full potential has not been utilized. Although an increasing number of organizations have already committed to virtualization by investing in platforms such as VMware ESX Server and Citrix XenServer Enterprise Edition, these same entities still continue to run a number of applications and network services on traditional hardware platforms. From the business point of view, this doesn’t make much sense as the only way to fully utilize the virtualization investment is to consolidate as many services and applications on these platforms as possible.

This is especially true in computing environments where the traditional servers (or hardware-based computing appliances) are used to run services that are not particularly CPU intensive. For example, if you think about DNS or DHCP servers running on dedicated servers, these services consume a very low percentage of the available resources for 95%+ of the time. And bearing Moore’s Law in mind, the situation is not getting any better going forward. Yet at the same time, running dedicated servers is warranted from the information security point of view, as it makes these servers less compromised to software vulnerabilities. With several services running on single box, a vulnerability in any piece of software will compromise all services running on that server.

This is exactly why running DNS and DHCP servers as virtual machines makes perfect sense: it offers you the best of both worlds. From the information security point of view, a virtual machine (VM) dedicated to a specific service or application is inherently more secure than a general purpose server running several services on single O/S. Further, running dedicated DNS and/or DHCP servers as VMs also allows organizations to optimize the usage of the computing power at their disposal. This is simply because virtualization platforms do not waste CPU resources on dedicated DNS and/or DHCP appliances in the same way as traditional, hardware-based computing appliances do.

To find out where we’re coming from, please have a look at our White Paper on Virtualized DNS and IP Addressing Environments.