I hear the word server in all sorts of contexts whenever computers are involved. What is a server and how does it relate to a PC?
In: Technology
A “Server” is a computer whose job is primarily to serve up something: Web pages, DNS services, Files, Databases… things that are “served” to users at other terminals (phones and PCs and gaming consoles and… all that). There can be a lot of things that need to run on servers but that list above is a lot of the bigger categories.
Now, way back in the day you’d have “a server” that was functionally just a big PC with a processor and hard drive and ram. This would usually be in a rack mounted box, a lot of time much bigger than a PC. Sometimes fairly flat and wide (a “pizza box” server). Eventually they started pulling the discs out of big servers to more efficiently serve, share, and replicate a whole lot of data over a storage network.
Shortly after storaage networks became prominent we saw multiplexers like VMWare put a LOT of “servers” on a single set of hardware. So instead of one instance of Linux server or Windows server running in each of those physical servers, now you were able to run a lot of servers, all sharing processor cycles and RAM time from a pool of resources in one big physical box. That box still mostly acts like a PC at a laymans level, but no one except the data center admins/architects see the base OS (like ESXi) and they manage that base OS to host a lot (dozens, often; sometimes hundreds) of server OS inscances from the same physical box.
hth
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