Features
VMware Infrastructure 3 offers a number of services that transform x86 datacenters into a shared dynamic utility platform through infrastructure, application, and management services.For a comprehensive list of features download the key features summary.
Key Features
- Infrastructure Services virtualize industry standard servers, storage and networks to create a unified resource that can be precisely allocated to applications
- Application Services are built in services that provide availability, scalability and security (future) to all applications
- Management Services (provided by the vCenter family of solutions) provide end to end automation of day to day management tasks
Infrastructure Services
vCompute services comprehensively and efficiently virtualize compute resources (CPU and memory) and aggregate them across many servers. VMware Infrastructure vCompute capabilities comprise:- Bare metal, efficient and reliable hypervisor VMware ESX runs directly on server hardware for near native virtual machine performance, reliability and scalability.
- Small footprint, highly secure virtualization. Reduce virtualization complexity with VMware ESXi, a compact 32MB form factor of VMware ESX, that is a fraction of the size of a general purpose operating system. VMware ESXi minimizes the surface area for potential security attacks, making it the most secure and reliable hypervisor.Learn more about the difference between VMware ESX and VMware ESXi.
- Optimal virtual machine performance for the highest consolidation ratios with the following techniques:
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- Transparent page sharing to utilize memory more efficiently by storing a single instance of shared memory pages
- RAM over-commitment to increase memory utilization
- Memory ballooning to ensure workloads are not starved
- Network performance optimizations to reduce CPU overhead
- Large memory pages and hardware page table support to optimize memory access
- Paravirtualization support for virtualization aware Linux operating systems
- Dynamic load balancing. VMware DRS aggregates CPU and memory across many physical servers into unified pools of resources that are made intelligently available to virtual machines based on business priority, enabling even higher levels of hardware utilization and no impact to service levels
- High energy efficiency levels. VMware DPM reduces your power consumption even more by automatically turning servers on and off in the datacenter to respond to changing resource requirements of applications
- High performance clustered file system. Store virtual machines as disk files on local or shared storage centrally managed by the VMware vStorage VMFS file system.
- When using shared storage such as Fibre channel or iSCSI , VMware vStorage VMFS functions as a logical volume manager and manages interaction of VMware ESX with the physical storage arrays.
- VMware vStorage VMFS allows multiple VMware ESX hosts to access the same LUN by controlling access to individual VM files with on-disk file locking
- Enhance the availability of virtual machine network ports through teaming of physical NICs and load balancing
- Use paravirtualized in-guest network drivers for enhanced i/o performance
Application Services
Availability. Lower planned and unplanned downtime for all applications.Minimize service disruptions due to planned hardware downtime with:
- VMware vMotion. Live migrate running virtual machines from one server to another with no disruption or downtime.
- VMware Storage vMotion. Live migrate running virtual machine disks from one storage array to another with no disruption or downtime.
- VMware HA. Protect against physical machine failures as well as operating system failures.
- VMware Consolidated Backup . Provides centralized, agentless backup capabilities with a one-step restore of virtual machine images provided by VMware vCenter Server
- Enable a single virtual machine to use up to four physical processors simultaneously with 4-way virtual symmetric multi processing and up to 64 GB of RAM.
- Enable virtual machines to dynamically shrink and grow their resource usage based on business priorities with VMware DRS.
- VMware vCenter Update Manager. Automate patch management with VMware vCenter Update Manager enforcing compliance to patch standards for VMware ESX hosts as well as Microsoft or Linux virtual machines. Secure patching of offline virtual machines as well as automated snapshots and rollback capabilities reduce risk in the environment. Integration with DRS allows for non-disruptive VMware ESX patching with little to no administrative overhead.
Management Services
Automate end to end IT processes with the VMware vCenter suite of solutions.- VMware vCenter Server is the central point of control for administration and management VMware Infrastructure environments. vCenter Server features:
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- Consolidation management. Analyze physical servers in smaller environments, plan for consolidation of good virtualization candidates and convert physical machines to virtual machines with VMware VirtualCenter Guided Consolidation.
- Provisioning management. Copy, clone or make templates from virtual machines. Deploy virtual machines instantly from templates.
- Configuration management. Establish and ensure compliance with corporate configuration standards through virtual machine templates
- Operations Management
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- Manage operations efficiently through task scheduling and alerting
- Comprehensively map the inventory and topology of your datacenter with topology maps in.
- Control access to virtual assets and functionality through fine grained access controls, custom roles & permissions and integration with existing Microsoft Active Directory authentication mechanisms.
- Convert physical machines, other virtual machines as well as backup images of virtual machines to running virtual machines through VMware vCenter Converter.
- Complementing vCenter Server, the VMware vCenter family of solutions provide control and automation for a wide ranging set of datacenter requirements.
- VMware vCenter solutions span both infrastructure and applications management in the virtual datacenter. They include an extensibility framework that allows seamless integration of VMware vCenter products with the products of VMware systems management partners, to deliver “single pane of glass” management of the datacenter.
