Hosted Virtual Machines
Familiar VM Tools
- Your applications, systems and network is not accessible or view-able by any other customer. Your information is ensured full privacy and security in your own private cloud.
- If your app runs on Hyper-V, it runs on Azure Services for Windows Virtual Machines. This means you can manage your entire infrastructure, on-premises or in the cloud, with System Center.
- With Virtual Machines, you can take advantage of what you already know to achieve new capabilities in the cloud.
Enterprise Grade
- With 99.9% monthly SLA for multiple instances, Virtual Machines are ready to extend on-premises workloads to the cloud. Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint Server, BizTalk Server, and many more server applications are validated to run on Virtual Machines.
- Optional managed support for validated workloads is directly provided by CommerceQuest South Africa (Pty) Ltd.
VM Elasticity
- Provision Compute Infrastructure at the pace your business requires.
- Unlock the IT backlog and provision infrastructure at the pace your business requires. Simply choose your compute configuration (standard or high memory instances) and choose an image from the Virtual Machines image gallery.
- Virtual Machines give your applications and systems full mobility, allowing you to move virtual hard disks (VHDs) back and forth between on-premises and the cloud.
Hosted Virtual Servers – security you can rely on
Hosted Virtual Servers’ multi-layered security ensures that virtual servers are as secure as possible without sacrificing the flexibility in configuration that customers demand.
Integrated network security
Our private cloud infrastructure provides significant protection against traditional network security issues. All solutions include protection against:
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attacks.
- Man in the Middle (MITM) attacks.
- IP Spoofing.
- Port Scanning.
- Packet sniffing by other tenants.
FIREWALL
We provide a complete firewall solution; this mandatory inbound firewall is configured in a default deny mode and customers must explicitly open all ports needed to allow inbound traffic.
The traffic may be restricted by protocol, by service port, as well as by source IP address (individual IP or Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) block).
Host operating system
All administrative systems are specifically designed, built, configured, and hardened to protect the management plane of the cloud:
- All access is logged and audited.
- When an employee no longer has a business need to access the management plane, the privileges and access to these hosts and relevant systems are revoked.
INSTANCE ISOLATION
Different instances running on the same physical machine are isolated from each other via the hypervisor.
In addition, the firewall resides within the hypervisor layer, between the physical network interface and the instance’s virtual interface. All packets must pass through this layer, thus an instance’s neighbours have no more access to that instance than any other host on the Internet and can be treated as if they are on separate physical hosts.
Guest operating system
Virtual instances are completely controlled by the customer who has full root access or administrative control over accounts and applications.
- Our systems do not have any access to customer instances and cannot log into the guest operating system.
PRIVILEGE ESCALATION
Customers should employ a privilege escalation mechanism with logging on a per-user basis.
Customers should generate their own key pairs in order to guarantee that they are unique, and not shared with other customers.
Our managed services security team can provide further advice and assistance.
Azure Services for Windows Dashboard
Management of your Virtual Machines is intuitive and easy. The Azure Services for Windows Dashboard provides a familiar web based interface to manage and configure your virtual infrastructure.
Control panel
This web-based portal allows you to securely access and easily manage your Virtual Machines.
- Create accounts.
- Manage virtual machines.
- Administer network, storage and security settings.
IN-BROWSER CONSOLE ACCESS
Our fully functional virtual machine console enables simple configuration and performance monitoring of virtual machine.
Measure usage
We provide a simple to use interface for monitoring and configuring your Private cloud.
- Define service offerings.
- Meter your usage.
- Generate internal billing records.
SNAPSHOTS AND ROLLBACK
Our web portal makes it simple to execute or schedule virtual machine backups and snapshots.
Cloud templates
Pre-packaged application templates to get up and running on the cloud fast.
- Custom templates provide a foundation for rapid deployment of specific user environments.
DELEGATED ADMINISTRATION
Increase agility and flexibility by offloading general day to day management to your end users and enable IT resources to be freed up for more business critical needs.
Hosted Virtual Machines software rental
Rather than purchase software for your Virtual Machines via the traditional method of outright purchase, our software licensing service enables you to rent your software on a monthly basis.
Better cash flow
You can avoid any start-up investment and you can change license volumes in response to your business demands.
- Flexible Cost Structure via a monthly usage-based cost. You pay only for what was use during the month.
- Cash Flow Management – Near zero start-up costs.
- No Upgrade fees – you will always have the most current versions of the software.
Easier to rent
We acquire the necessary software licenses. We then becomes the licensee and will ‘on-rent’ it to you via:
- Per User / Subscriber – License for each member of staff independent of the number of servers or branches a business may have.
- By Processor – allow an unlimited number of end users to use software running on a single processor.
Hosted Virtual Machine management
Maximise your Hosted Virtual Machines with virtual server management services for a predictable fixed monthly fee.
Maximise uptime
Maximise uptime, increase security, improve performance and manage your assets more effectively.
- Advanced monitoring and reporting – provides deep network monitoring with 24×7 alerts when issues arise.
- Integrated ticketing – ensures that our engineering team are automatically assigned to attend to any reporting alert.
Maximise security
We will protect your investment, your reputation and ensure compliance with legislated security:
- Patch Management – aggregates and summarises all of the security patches required and reports on all base line security scans.
- On an on-going basis, our team will use this analysis to plan and execute the work required to ensure your site security.
Pro-active support
Our comprehensive reporting ensures that that you will know exactly how your solution is performing:
- Preventative maintenance – We are able to solve most problems before you even know they are happening. This reduces the costs of downtime and emergency repairs, and increases your productivity.
- We simplify and aggregate all this information in to a monthly Executive summary.
Business benefits of Hosted Virtual Machines
Using Hosted Virtual Servers lets you reduce IT costs while increasing the efficiency, utilisation, and flexibility of your existing assets.
Agility
Virtualisation ensures a significant reduction in time to launch applications.
- Standard configurations -Because a virtualised environment requires a level of standardisation, it becomes easier to drive uptime through consistent configuration and patching of server operating systems.
- Migrate workloads easily – In the case of downtime reduction, operating systems can be moved from one server to another to facilitate repairs or maintenance, avoiding the lengthy downtime normally associated with that service.
Efficiency
Leverage a complete set of integrated systems management tools.
- Automation – Our Management software can be used to automate routine tasks, such as monitoring common infrastructure alerts and automating responses for known conditions, leading to an increase in IT staff efficiency.
- Faster response to incidents – This can occur in a number of ways, ranging from automated responses to simple alerts and alarms, to automatic creation of trouble and repair tickets for service desk functions.
Peace of mind
Server Virtualisation helps cuts down on total annual downtime.
- Improved availability – According to the IDC, advanced virtualisation reduces annual downtime by 50%.
- Scalability is a click away – Once virtualised, an application that needs more scalability can be moved to a server that can fulfill that requirement with little more than a few clicks of the mouse.
- Snapshots – It is now possible, with little more than some mouse clicks, to replicate and trial test environments.