vSphere : Completeness of Virtualization

VMware vSphere is a new product of VMware which supports Cloud level infrastructure. It is released in 2009 with lot of new features and enhancements. It only available in 64bit vesrion, but supports all types of Virtual Machines (32bit and 64bit). The Management suite includes the following applications.

vSphere New Features 1. Storage VMotion 2. Host profiles 3. VM Fault Tolerance 4. vApps 5. vShieldzones 6. Distributed vSwitch 7. Distributed Power Management Existing Features 8. VMotion 9. DRS 10. HA Storage VMotion It is also available in VMware Infrastructure 3. It is a plug-in that needs to be installed on vCenter. Till now we are doing VMotion of VM, means moving the VM from one ESX host to another without downtime while the VM is running. But with SVMotion we can move VM files (.vmdk) from one data store to another without any downtime. This can be done in several cases like, insufficient disk space on Datastore, vmfs upgrade, vmfs maintenance, LUN maintenance etc. Host profiles This is absolutely new feature introduced with vSphere. With this feature we can create a profile for all ESX hosts with recommended settings. This created profile can be applied to entire cluster or a single host in the cluster. In other words its a blue print of recommended settings for perfect management of entire cluster. With this feature we can configure all the hosts with the same settings which is helpful in conditions like VMotion, DRS and HA etc. VM Fault Tolerance This is also a new feature introduced with vSphere. With this feature we will get absolute high availability of a Virtual Machine. When you enable this feature for a VM, it creates a secondary VM from the original. The secondary will always be in sync with original. In case of first VM failure or the ESX host on which it resides failures immediately the secondary will continue to

work without any downtime. Secondary maintains absolutely exact copy of the original, so that it will be available all the time. vApps A vApp has the same basic operation as a virtual machine, but can contain multiple virtual machines or appliances. With vApps, you can perform operations on multi-tier applications as separate entities (for example, clone,power on and off, and monitor). vApps package and manage those applications. vShieldzones It is again a new feature of vSphere. With this feature we can provide more security at the Virtual Machine level. VShield Zones is essentially a virtual firewall designed to protect VMs and analyze virtual network traffic. Distributed vSwitch This is an extra-ordinary feature of vSphere 4.0, which saves lot of administrative time in configuring networking on each and every single ESX server in a cluster individually. With this ultimate feature we can configure a dvSwitch at the cluster level, which is applied to all the hosts. So that the network configuration on all hosts remains identical which avoids network related issues while doing vMotion like things. Distributed Power Management This is a feature which is already available in VI 3 also, but VMware made it available as an experimental feature. DPM works in a way same as DRS. It is obviously a dependent on DRS. When an ESX host using a very low resources DRS starts calculating the things behind, and then moves the Virtual Machines on it to another hosts. After migration is done, it simply power off the ESX host which is not at all in use at that time using DPM. When ever resource requirement increases on the remaining hosts in the cluster, it then power on the previously power down ESX server. Then again move the VM's with high resource contention to the newly powered on ESX server. But it is not recommended to implement this feature in production environments