VMware vSphere Hosting Features
VMware vSphere is the industry’s most complete and robust virtualization platform, transforming datacenters into a dramatically simplified cloud infrastructure and enabling the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services.
Leveraging VMware’s industry-leading technology and experience, VMware vSphere delivers agility with uncompromised control in the most efficient manner, while fully preserving customer choice. This combination of elements makes VMware vSphere the best platform for achieving the full benefits of cloud computing.
Key Features
VMware vSphere comprises a number of components that transform industry standard hardware into a shared, main-frame like resilient environment with built in service level controls for all applications. The components of VMware vSphere are classified into:
Infrastructure Services –These components comprehensively virtualize server, storage and network resources, aggregate them and allocate them precisely on demand to applications based on business priority.
Application Services –These are components that provide built in service level controls to all applications running on the vSphere platform, regardless of application type or operating system.
VMware vCenter Operations and VMware vCenter Server provide the foundation for virtualization management, essential for administering infrastructure and application services, with deep visibility into every aspect of virtual infrastructure, automation of day to day operational tasks and the scalability to manage large datacenter environments.
Infrastructure Services
Compute: Compute services efficiently virtualize server resources and aggregate them into logical pools that can be precisely allocated to applications.
- vSphere ESXi provides a robust, production-proven, high performance virtualization layer that abstract server hardware resources and allow their sharing by multiple virtual machines. Unique memory management including memory compression and advanced scheduling capabilities of the vSphere host allow for the highest consolidation ratios and the best application performance, in many cases, even better than physical servers.
- vSphere DRS aggregates compute resources across many clusters and dynamically allocates them to virtual machines based on business priorities, reducing management complexity through automation. vSphere DPM, included with vSphere DRS, automates energy efficiency in DRS clusters by continuously optimizing the power consumed in a DRS cluster.
Storage: Storage services abstract away from the complexity of back-end storage systems and enable the most efficient utilization of storage in virtual environments.
- vSphere Storage DRS leverages automated load balancing based on storage characteristics to determine the best place for virtual machine data to live.
- vSphere Profile-Driven Storage streamlines storage resource selection by grouping storage according to a user-defined policy.
- vSphere Auto Deploy allows us to deploy more vSphere hosts running the ESXi hypervisor architecture “on the fly”. Once running, completely eliminate patching by pushing out updated images rather than scheduling patch windows.
- vSphere Storage I/O Control defines priority access to storage resources according to established business rules. This enables a pre-programmed response to occur when access to a storage resource becomes contentious.
- vSphere Storage VMFS is a high performance cluster file system which abstracts away the complexity of storage hardware from applications. VMFS allows efficient sharing and controls concurrent access to storage by virtualized servers.
- vSphere Storage Thin Provisioning allows storage purchases to be deferred until they are really required, reducing storage spending by up to 50%.
- vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) offer a new API structure for supported 3rd party disk arrays to improve performance for common vSphere activities such as provisioning a VM.
- vSphere Storage APIs for Storage Awareness offers a new API structure for enabling deeper interaction between vSphere and 3rd party disk arrays. This API will enable vSphere to further understand the capabilities of any supported disk array. Capabilities such as snapshot, deduplication, replication, and others can now be communicated to vSphere in order to better associate a required SLAs with the type of storage a given virtual machine should utilize when it is created.
Network: Network services enable optimal administration and management of networking in virtual environments.
- vSphere Network I/O Control - Definite priority access to network resources according to established business rules. This enables a pre-programmed response to occur when access to a network resource becomes contentious.
- vSphere Distributed Switch simplifies and enhances the provisioning, administration and control of virtual machine networking in VMware vSphere environments
- Support for 3rd party switch technology such as the Cisco Nexus 1000V for simplified network management across both virtual and physical assets
Application Services
Availability: solutions for both planned and unplanned downtime.
Planned Downtime
- vSphere vMotion eliminates the need to schedule application downtime due to planned server maintenance through live migration of virtual machines across servers with no disruption to users or loss of service.
- vSphere Storage vMotion eliminates the need to schedule application downtime due to planned storage maintenance or during storage migrations by enabling live migration of virtual machine disks with no disruption to users or loss of service.
Unplanned Downtime
- vSphere High Availability (HA) provides cost effective, automated restart within minutes for all applications in the event of hardware or operating system failures. With Fault Domain Manager, VMware HA is more reliable in operation, more easily scalable in its ability to protect virtual machines, and can provide better uptime than before.
- vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) provides continuous availability, without any data loss or downtime, to any application.
- vSphere Data Recovery provides simple, cost effective, agentless backup and recovery for virtual machines (Other backup solutions may be used depending upon service configuration).
Security:
- vShield Zones simplifies application security by enforcing corporate security policies at the application level in a shared environment, while still maintaining trust and network segmentation of users and sensitive data.
- VMware VMsafe enables the use of security products that work in conjunction with the virtualization layer to provide higher levels of security to virtual machines than even physical servers.
Scalability:
- VMware DRS dynamically load balances server resources to deliver the right resource to the right application based on business priority; allowing applications to shrink and grow as needed.
- Hot add enables CPU and memory to be added to virtual machines when needed without disruption or downtime.
- Hot plug enables virtual storage and network devices to be added to or removed from virtual machines without disruption or downtime
- Hot extend of virtual disks allows virtual storage to be added to running virtual machines without disruption or downtime
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