vSphere: New Features and Benefits

Expert Reference Series of White Papers
vSphere: New Features
and Benefits
1-800-COURSES www.globalknowledge.comvSphere: New Features and Benefits
Bill Ferguson, Global Knowledge Instructor, VCI, VCP, CCSI, MCT
IntroductionVirtualization of servers is one of the hottest topics in today's IT environment. The ability to consolidate many physical servers into one physical server using virtual machines has led to dramatic changes in regard to busi-ness continuity and disaster recovery strategies for small and large organizations alike. VMware has been a key leader in server virtualization for at least the last decade. In fact, most of the current Fortune 100 companies use VMware products as part of their network infrastructure.
One of the reasons that VMware continues to lead is that they haven't been content to "stand on their lau-rels" with their last product; instead they continue to stretch the technology, as well as the imagination, with their next product. vSphere, VMware's latest release, adds approximately 150 new features to its previous VI3 product! The purpose of this white paper is to highlight the most notable of these features and to discuss the benefits they offer your organization's IT infrastructure.
This paper is divided into three sections, based on three major types of improvements. First, we will discuss what's new in the overall vSphere product in regard to configuration maximums, installation, host profiles, and hot plug capability, as well as the concept of cloud computing. Second we will discuss the new features of the vCenter Server 4.0 and how they simplify management for you and reduce the complexity of working with large virtual environments. Finally, we will discuss the new business aspects of vSphere and the features included in each of the four editions of the product.
What's New in vSphere 4.0It might be more appropriate to ask "what's not new" in vSphere 4.0! A completely new approach and a new list of acronyms are provided by cloud computing. New, and unbelievable, configuration maximums have been achieved. The installation of the host server has been simplified and can now be profiled. The capability on virtual machines to hot-add components that were once thought impossible has been achieved.
Cloud ComputingVMware has taken a completely new approach to virtualization by embracing the cloud computing concept and developing vSphere as an internal-private cloud (the datacenter) that can co-exist with external clouds provided by third-parties (such as Amazon, Nirvanix, and many others). Cloud computing serves businesses that need production-level performance and reliability, regardless of whether the resource is on or off their premises. A
Copyright ©2009 Global Knowledge Training LLC. All rights reserved. 2huge ecosystem of technology and cloud service providers has emerged over the last few years and continues to expand.
vSphere promises to offer choice of provider, reliable technologies, and full application support for this new cloud computing environment. Users can leverage the Virtual Appliance Marketplace to deploy over 1000 ap-plications to a cloud or to an on-premise environment. Also new to vSphere and cloud computing is the concept of a vApp, which is a logical "wrapper" that contains an application as well as all of the virtual machines and resources required to make it function, whether internal or external. Often, applications require more than one virtual machine to function properly (for example, a NAT client requires a NAT router), so the concept of the vApp adds a capability to manage an application at a new level while at the same time reducing the complexity involved.
New Configuration MaximumsI can't count the number of times that my VI3 students have said that they are beginning to consolidate servers but that some of the very high-powered servers have not even been considered because of the processor and memory limitations of VMs on VI3. It's interesting to me that the configuration maximums of 4 processors and 64GB of RAM per VM could be considered as a "limitation" but, in some cases, the physical servers that are being used for databases or other high-capacity jobs require more resources than those maximums allow. With vSphere, VMware has all but obliterated that particular objection to consolidating a physical server to a virtual one. Below are some of the new, and some... [download for more]