When is Dedicated Infrastructure not Dedicated?

Remember that bit in Matilda where Danny Devito sells the piece-of-junk cars as good as new?

Yes, it might be a clever scam in a charming children’s film but let’s be honest: we would be horrified to find out we’d paid for something in good faith only to find out we’re not getting exactly what we thought.

Take Dedicated Servers, for instance; you order something advertised online as a Dedicated Server, and expect you are paying for a physical racked server in the datacentre of your choice. But what if you’re actually only getting a virtual server described to sound like a DS?

This can make vast amount of difference in the activity of your trading operations, as virtual servers have a limited access to a shared pool of resources at the same time, whereas Dedicated Server resources are yours and only yours. For example, on an NFP date, you don’t want “Noisy Neighbours” all clamouring to access the same resources and significantly slowing your operations. This is why it is imperative to check that your DS is definitely a physical server.

How can you ensure you’re getting the DS that you paid for?

We’ve come up with a few key indicators that anyone can use to check if their server is in fact a Virtual Machine.

1. The first thing you can do to check if you have a dedicated or virtual machine is by opening the Task Manager and looking under the Performance tab. If you have a physical server, the Cores and Logical Processors should be displayed here. If instead it says, Virtual Processors and Virtual Machine, then this is clearly a virtual server.

2. Another simple indicator of a virtual machine is looking at the System Information in Windows, where the System Manufacturer and System Model are clearly highlighted. The System Manufacturer for a dedicated server will be listed as IBM, Dell, HP, or Supermicro for example, whereas a virtual server will show that it is a Virtualization Platform by VMWare. It will also note that “A hypervisor has been detected.”

3. Finally, checking the Device Manager in the Control Panel can show whether or not VMWare drivers are installed:

Or if the drivers are part of a physical installation:

At Beeks, we offer Virtual Machines as Virtual Private Servers, and we also offer Bare Metal Dedicated Servers – clearly distinguishing the Virtual (the VPS) from the Physical (DS).

We are not resellers either; all of our infrastructure is owned and managed by Beeks. If you call one of our engineers, this is the person who is actually handling your machine. We operate and oversee everything ourselves.

When you order a Dedicated Server with anyone, make sure you check these indicators so that you can be positive you’re getting what you pay for.

Don’t get Devito-ed.

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