VMware vSphere

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This page was last edited on 7 January 2019, at 22:46.

vSphere is a server virtualization platform from VMware. It is not an operating system or application per se. The name covers a range of technologies under the VMWare Infrastructure umbrella since version 4.

vCenter controls ESXi hosts. ESXi runs any number of VMs. Total 1024 VMs per host, 4096 VCPUS per host. 2 - 768 CPUs per ESXi host, 4GB-16TB memory limit. 32 Gigabit ports, or 16 10Gbit adapters, or 4 25/40/50/100Gbit adapters.

ESXi - vmkernel, hypervisor, host Datastore - location where vm data is stored. can be from any number of storage backing methods:

Storage 

* Local, vmfs
* SAN
 * Fibre Channel
 * FCoE
 * iSCSI
* NAS via NFS
* vSAN (vS 5.5)
* VVOLS (vS 6.0)

Hosted Architecture - using a generic OS (such as windows, linux) to run VMs. Compare this to Bare Metal Architecture - using an actual minimal hypervisor built for running VMS such as ESXi, or HyperV.

Software Defined Data Center is where all infrastructure (network, machines, storage) is virtualized.

Virtualization is the process of creating a software-based representation of physical machines, networks, or storage. VMs itself is a running program that represent a physical machine and its properties can be configured programatically (such as storage, network, cpu, memory, etc).

Other benefits include:

  • Isolated from other VMs, and
  • Sheltered from physical hardware changes/faults.
  • Files can be provisioned into VMs, or snapshotted, or moved, etc.
  • ACLs can be made to limit user access to certain VMs or resources.

Core resources managed by the vmkernel:

  • CPU
  • Memory
  • Disk
  • Network



Clients

  • Adobe Flex/Flash
  • HTML5 - has 97% of features. vsphere advanced configuration not there yet. next version should be feature complete
  • vSphere Client - Deprecated windows client

Networking

  • vSphere Distributed Switches (VDS)
  • vSphere Standard Switches (VSS)

Storage

  • vSAN
  • NFS
  • iSCSI
  • Fibre Channel SAN - FCSAN

Content Library

A feature since 6.5 that allows VM templates to be shared across different vSphere.

Migration

  • vMotion across ESXi hosts, across datacenters, encrypted.

vRealize Orchestrator

vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

  • Across 64 ESXi hosts

Patch management using VMware vSphere Update Manager