Dedicated Host: Single Tenancy Benefits
Key Points
- A dedicated host is a physical cloud server that you alone control, letting you schedule all virtual server instances (VSIs) on that single piece of hardware.
- In a multitenant setup the same host is sliced into VSIs that are shared across multiple customers, whereas a dedicated host keeps the entire box exclusive to you.
- This single‑tenancy provides an extra layer of security, which is especially valuable for regulated workloads in healthcare, banking, and finance.
- Because all your VSIs reside on the same physical machine, inter‑instance communication incurs far lower latency, boosting performance for high‑performance‑compute (HPC) and other tightly coupled workloads.
- Dedicated hosts offer flexibility in how you allocate resources—you can split the host’s capacity any way you like, from large half‑half partitions to many small instances.
Full Transcript
# Dedicated Host: Single Tenancy Benefits **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL_A6wAvxGU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL_A6wAvxGU) **Duration:** 00:03:20 ## Summary - A dedicated host is a physical cloud server that you alone control, letting you schedule all virtual server instances (VSIs) on that single piece of hardware. - In a multitenant setup the same host is sliced into VSIs that are shared across multiple customers, whereas a dedicated host keeps the entire box exclusive to you. - This single‑tenancy provides an extra layer of security, which is especially valuable for regulated workloads in healthcare, banking, and finance. - Because all your VSIs reside on the same physical machine, inter‑instance communication incurs far lower latency, boosting performance for high‑performance‑compute (HPC) and other tightly coupled workloads. - Dedicated hosts offer flexibility in how you allocate resources—you can split the host’s capacity any way you like, from large half‑half partitions to many small instances. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL_A6wAvxGU&t=0s) **What Is a Dedicated Host?** - Bradley Knapp explains that a dedicated host is a single‑tenant cloud server giving a customer exclusive control over an entire physical host and its virtual instances, unlike the shared resources of multitenant virtual servers. ## Full Transcript
Hey, everybody, my name is Bradley Knapp, and
we've come together today to talk about what is a dedicated host?
Dedicated host is a construct that you see a lot in the world of cloud,
but it's a little confusing. What does this dedicated host thing actually mean? Why does it
look like it's so expensive when you compare it to buying a dedicated instance or just a normal
virtual server? And the answer is dedicated hosts are a way to provide single tenancy.
Single tenancy means that no one else can run on the compute that you are running on.
So, if we think about a physical cloud host, right, we've got our actual cloud server here.
This is the actual host that runs in the data center. In a normal multitenant environment,
we would take, and we would divide that host up into pieces, and every one of these pieces as a
virtual server that you would buy. I'll just mark that as VSI. In a dedicated host, we still have
the same host, that same box that we were talking about before. But instead, this is your box,
and you control all of the VSIs that schedule on to it. So instead of this being customer A, and
this being customer B, and this being customer C, this is all yours. And so you can choose to divide
it up however you want. You can have one third of it go into one VSI and two thirds go into another.
You can divide it half and half, or you can put lots of little bitty ones on it.
And so, the question, of course, always becomes, why would I do this, what is the
value of a dedicated host? Why would I purchase this thing? And the answer is really twofold.
First is that single tenancy that I mentioned before. Single tenancy means that you don't
have to worry about anybody else being able to crash through the hypervisor layer within
this host and get to your data. Even though it's already incredibly secured in the world of cloud,
it's just one more layer of protection. This is very important for health care workloads,
folks in banking and finance like that.
But in addition to that single tenancy, it also allows you to schedule workloads
that want to be close to be each other, close to each other. So, if we think of our example here,
where we've got two VSIs of the same size, let's imagine a high-performance compute workload,
something that in the world of HPC, where you have lots of compute working on the same problem.
In order to minimize latency and maximize performance, you want to pack these onto a few
physical hosts as possible because data transit through a physical host is much faster than data
that goes across the network. If we think about our example over here, where we've got our multi
tenancy, and we've got multiple multitenant boxes, every one of these has to link together,
and that link together takes time. There is a latency penalty that you pay. But in a dedicated
host like we have over on this side, because these all run on the same physical box, you don't incur
that latency penalty and you can order multiple dedicated hosts in order to make that happen.
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