At Nixu Software, we have been rather active on the virtualization front during the last six months or so. After we started looking into this rapidly growing technology domain, we’ve found an increasing number of organizations all over the world looking to virtualize parts of their core network services (our forte, DNS, is just one of them). To facilitate this development, we have developed and launched a virtualization-ready product family to meet the DNS and IP addressing needs of the 21st century.

Today’s x86 servers often exceed the DNS performance requirements of organizations when the service is run on dedicated servers. In cases such as this, DNS virtualization makes perfect sense. Better yet, there are also other benefits to virtualization. Following, please find a couple of excerpts from VMware’s materials on the benefits of virtualization (over traditional hardware-based computing appliances):

“While the computing appliance approach makes the initial experience with a specific solution easier, the approach does have some downsides. The major problem with this approach is that it requires a specific piece of physical hardware. The specific hardware is selected by the solution vendor and may not be manufactured by a customer’s preferred hardware vendor. Additionally, while the appliance is sold by the company developing the solution, very often the hardware is serviced and supported by a third party that may or may not be certified on the appliance. If there is a hard drive failure on an appliance that is physically maintained by a company other than the appliance vendor, the repair process may require multiple parties to coordinate their efforts in order to bring that appliance back up.”

“The virtual appliance approach takes the best of both the traditional software approach and the computing appliance approach and combines them in a way that delivers both convenience and flexibility. By targeting a virtualization layer like the one provided by VMware, solution vendors can pre-install and pre-configure their solutions in a similar fashion to a traditional computing appliance. However, with a virtual appliance, the solution vendor no longer needs to procure and distribute a physical device.”

“Demonstrations, proof-of-concept projects, and evaluations can be done with virtual appliances with very little cost…”

We couldn’t have put it better ourselves. And so, if you are looking to virtualize the network services in your organization or expect to implement DNS servers, please do have a look at Nixu NameSurfer Suite and Nixu SNS. All you have to do is to download an ISO image from our website (free for 30-day trial) and boot up a virtual machine (or a clean x86 server) with the package: it auto-installs the entire software stack from a hardened OS (CentOS) to application layer in just 10 minutes creating you a secure, dedicated DNS appliance.