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 serves information.
It is not necessarily its own computer. I have run servers on my home computer and on my laptop. I could install software called Apache which is a web server. Whenever I do that I also install MyQSL which is a database server. I have also added file servers and control servers to my regular PC. So at the most basic, the server is software.
You can get a light bulb with a web server on it. Your internet modem has a server on it if you are able to access a web page for configuration that’s built into it.
At work I use a whole bunch of different kinds of servers. Some of the specialized ones are just web servers installed on little pieces of equipment. It could be a door controller, air conditioner controller, phone system, or many other things.
When I walk into the server room there are some big metal boxes in there that we call servers. These are really powerful reliable machines with multiple processors, lots of hard drives, lots of RAM, multiple network ports, and more than one power supply. But these machines run a program that allows them to have virtual servers inside of them. While it only one physical machine, it looks like I could have 10 or 20 machines running Linux or Windows Server (the actual name of the operating system). These are all just like fully fledged computers running inside the software of the big physical server.
So I look at the big metal server computer, and inside of it I have 10 virtual computers that I call servers. When I run any of those servers they could be running software that’s acting as a server to provide coordinated information to computers that are the clients.
Summary
A server is a machine. It can run virtual machines on it that are called servers. These can then run multiple services that act as servers to all the clients.
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