Service separation

From Sysadmin

Service separation is an important principal within system administration. In this article a reference to a service can be taken to mean a group of tightly coupled services also. All else being equal each service should be separated by hard resource barriers. Until recently the principal way to achieve this was to place each service on a separate host, to the extent that this was economically feasible. The improvements in server technology in recent years have allowed wider use of virtualisation so that today different services are often run on their own virtual servers on the same physical hardware. It may still be desirable to seperate services so that a given server is only used for one class of service, such as production, quality assurance, or development. Even with virtualisation available the use of service separation is still a cost benefit analysis.

Arrangement of services with respect to service separation is a cost benefit analysis.

Separation of servics by virtual host can significantly reduce expenditure on server hardware and can reduce downtime but management overhead may not be significantly reduced.