Determining best practices for windows server deployment in the cloud

The biggest obstacle today in Windows Server deployment is deciding upon whether to use it native or virtualized for maximum resource utilization. Windows Server holds seventy-five percent of the market shares of fortune 500 companies. Considering the monopoly of Windows Server over server market, it is crucial to study about best practices for deploying Windows Server in Virtualized/Non-Virtualized environment. The financial benefits provided by the virtualization are generally too high in areas of power consumption, platform support, maintainability of data centers and reliability; therefore, it is important to test the performance of different virtualization environments like Windows's Hyper-V and third party hypervisors like ESXi and KVM for workloads on Windows Server. A number of parameters like cost, efficiency, performance, architecture support, and manageability have to be addressed in delivering cloud platforms to the large user base with various needs. The use of virtualization environment and resource sharing through Windows Server may introduce performance penalties in the clouds, which have to be found out. The proposed work tends to identify such penalties by using benchmarking tools like PCMark, and AIDA64. Analyzing the performance parameters of Windows Server with different virtualization environments gives us insight into the best deployment policies for Windows Server in scenarios such as Storage cloud, Application cloud, Database hosts and etc. The paper focuses on such issues and want to reach out to the customers with different needs in case of using windows server with bare metal or hosted hypervisors.