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Objective 1.5 – Identify vSphere Architecture and Solutions |
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Written by Matthijs van den Berg
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Wednesday, 07 October 2009 22:28 |
Knowledge
- Differentiate VMware platform products and editions
VMware differentiated it’s product in roughly two categories with per category several area’s of attention and products. In a hierarchy this looks like:
- Datacenter products
- VMware Infrastructure 3
- VMware vSphere 4
- VMware Server
- VMware ESXi (Free)
- Management products in the vCenter lineup
- VMware vCenter Server (formerly VMware VirtualCenter)
- VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat
- VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
- VMware vCenter Lab Manager
- VMware vCenter Chargeback
- VMware Data Recovery
- VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
- VMware vCenter Converter
- VMware vCenter AppSpeed (formerly B-hive Conductor)
- Desktop products
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- Enterprise Desktop
- VMware View
- VMware ThinApp
- VMware MVP
- VMware ACE
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- Consumer Desktop
- VMware Workstation
- VMware Fusion
- VMware Player (free)
- Understand the various data-center solutions (View, SRM, Lab Manager, etc.)
VMware has developed more and more products that add functionality or help providing more up-time to you infrastructure. These additional software product can help you solve complex business cases, add functionality of ensure your business is always on. For some of these additional products I have written a short description:
- Site Recovery Manager
This products helps you to get your virtual machines up and running really fast after a site failure. Your infrastructure has to be separated over two sites with a network and SAN replication in place. When your production site fails this product can start a script to mount the replicated SAN volumes, change network addresses if needed and start the VMs in a predefined order. Remember this product is for large implementations only and requires selected hardware and a carefully planned fail-over script.
- VMware Server Heartbeat
The VMware server heartbeat product helps you to make your vCenter Server implementation completely redundant. The products make a fully redundant setup including the database, licences etc. Because the VMware vCenter Server is an important part of the vSphere infrastructure (takes care of DRS, manages the VM’s, etc.) making this part redundant can be beneficial in certain environment. Again, mainly targeted at large infrastructures that demand high availability.
- VMware Lab Manager
This product allows administrators in you organization to rapidly deploy test environments. A predefined set of VM’s can be cloned to make a dedicated and clean environment used for development, testing etc. These VMs can be based upon the production Virtual Machines. Since Lab Manager 4 Stage Manager is fully integrated, and is no longer available as a separate product.
- Life Cycle Manager
This product allows you to deploy VM’s based upon a catalog to ensure consistency in VM deployment. You can make sure these VMs are compliant with your IT policy and retire VMs when necessary.
- VMware Converter
VMware Converter allows you to migrate virtual and / or physical machines to you virtual infrastructure. The product can import a OS on a physical host to a VM including the installation of VMware Tools. Also VM’s from consumer products or from products of other vendors can be migrated to work on you infrastructure.
- VMware View
Not quite sure wheter this belongs into this list as VMware officially stated it as a Desktop product. This product allows you to use you virtual infrastructure to host desktops: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure or VDI. You can provide users with a per user virtual machine that they can work in. View allows for easy management, thin provisioning etc.
- Explain ESX/ESXi architecture
VMware ESX(i) is based upon the virtualization concept of separating the operating system (OS) and the underlying hardware by placing a hyper-visor in between. This hyper-visor allows the installation of multiple OS’s on the same hardware platform. Resources are managed by the hyper-visor and divided over the guest. You can find more info here.
- Compare and contrast bare metal vs. hosted architecture
New definition per 4 February 2010 thanks to mvaughn.
We can separate 3 type of installation of an OS:
- Directly on the hardware, no virtualization
Speaks for itself, no virtualization, 100% of the resources for the OS. This combination gives us the best performance (native) but when the OS has nothing to do, the server is not utilized. In most cases when the servers is under load the hardware is still not being utilized over 10%. This is the reason why virtualization is hot, you can run multiple OSes and utilize more resources!
- Bare Metal or Type 1 Hypervisor (according the the definition of Brian Madden, explains here for workstations)
Virtualization allows you to run more operating systems on the same physical hardware resulting in a better utilized system. This virtualization layer is a thin and dedicated layer (ESX) that does nothing else then supporting VMs with resources. When possible a VM will be given direct access to hardware resources (CPU, MEM, NIC, etc.)
- Hosted or Type 2
When using this method the virtualization layer runs on top of a OS. It uses the OS to access resources like processor and memory. The VM layer is usually not aware of the underlying hardware; this is handled by the OS. Usually this type of virtualization has a larger performance penalty due to the extra OS layer.
Remember a lot is said about virtualization, the benefits, downsides etc. Google on Internet to find out so much more you never thought it would fit on the net. My estimation is that if you understand the basics of virtualization and can point out the differences between bare metal and virtualization this will do for the VCP exam. If you disagree, please use the comment system and let’s get talking!
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