vSphere

COMPUTE:

All virtual machine configuration information, state information and data are encapsulated in a set of
discrete files stored on a datastore.

A virtual machine is configured with at least one virtual CPU (VCPU) and as many as 64 VCPUs, if you use
vSphere's virtual symmetric multiprocessor feature called VMware Virtual SMP. When a VCPU needs to
run, the VMkernel maps the VCPU to an available hardware execution context (HEC). A HEC is a
processors capability to schedule one thread of execution, which corresponds to a CPU core or a
hyperthread (if the CPU supports hyperthreading).

vSphere uses several features to support the efficient use of RAM and higher consolidation rations,
including transparent page sharing, guest memory reclaim, and memory compression.

transparent page sharing: When there is idle CPU time, vSphere looks for pages located across virtual
machines that can be matched with one another and shared in physical RAM.
guest memory reclaim: reclaim idle memory or free memory from a virtual machine
memory compression: ESX/ESXi provides a memory compression cache to improve virtual machine
performance when you use memory overcommitment.( Memory overcommit is a hypervisor feature
that allows a virtual machine (VM) to use more memory space than the physical host has available. For
example, virtualization platforms like VMware ESX allow a host server with 2 GB of physical memory to
run four guest machines, each with 1 GB of memory space allocated.)

When several virtual machines are running together on a single host (or in a cluster), vSphere uses
shares and limits to make sure that each virtual machine has enough resources, including CPU, memory,
network and storage. Shares guarantee that a virtual machine is given a certain percentage of a
resource, according to the defaults in place. Limits provide a hard ceiling for resource allocation,
depending on the configuration of a virtual machine.

You can divide and allocate CPU and memory resources hierarchically with resource pools, depending on
business need, such as maintaining administrative boundaries or accommodating departmental
divisions. Resource pools are also used to delegate privileges to other users and groups.

Virtualization Advantages
Compatibility Virtual machines, which have all of the components found in a physical
computer, are compatible with all standard x86 operating systems, applications and device
drivers and can run the same software as physical x86 computers.
Isolation Virtual machines can share the physical resources of a single computer, but they
remain as isolated as if they were separate physical machines. The availability and security of
applications running in a virtual environment is far superior to applications running in a non-
virtualized system.
Encapsulation Thanks to encapsulation, virtual machines are portable and easy to manage,
containing a complete set of virtual hardware resources with an operating system and its
applications. A virtual machine can be moved and copied like any other file and saved on any
standard data storage medium.
Hardware independence Because virtual machines are independent from their underlying
physical hardware, you can configure them with virtual components that are completely
different from the physical components present on the underlying hardware. They can even run
different kinds of operating systems.

Compute features:
1. vSphere ESXi Hypervisor
Improved Security: There's no longer a dependency on a shared root account when using the ESXi Shell.
Local users who are assigned administrative privileges automatically have full shell accessthere's no
need to "su" to run commands as the root user.
Extensive Logging and Auditing: vSphere 5.5 logs all user activity from both the Shell and the Direct
Console User Interface under the user's account. This logging ensures user accountability and makes it
easy to audit user activity.
Enhanced vMotion: For small virtual infrastructure implementations, combined vMotion migration
means that the entire virtual machine (memory, CPU and disk) moves from one host to another. In
larger environments, enhanced vMotion means that you can live-migrate entire virtual machines from
one cluster to another, even if those clusters don't share storage.
New Virtual Hardware: 64 virtual CPUs, 1 TB RAM, 120 devices per virtual machine, VMDK (virtual
machine disk) size increased to 62TB, guest OS Storage Reclamation returns disk space to the storage
pool when it's de-allocated from within the guest OS, improved CPU virtualization by exposing more
information about the host CPU architecture to virtual machines.
Active Directory Integration: You can join vSphere hosts to your Active Directory domain. Once added,
Active Directory handles user authentication and removes the need to create user accounts on each
host.
Centralized Management of Host Image and Configuration via Auto Deploy: The Auto Deploy library
centrally stores all vSphere host images. Administrators can automatically provision new hosts based on
user-defined rules and host rebuilds are as simple as a reboot.
Stateless Firewall: The new firewall engine eliminates the use of IPTABLES and allows administrators to
define port rules for services.

2. Distributed Resource Scheduler, Distributed Power Management
DRS: continuously monitors CPU and memory utilization across a cluster of vSphere hosts, allocating
resources among virtual machines according to business needs.
DPM allows you to:
Cut power and cooling costs by as much as 20 percent during low utilization periods.
Automate energy management in your data center more efficiently.

Initial Workload Placement: When you power on a virtual machine in a cluster, DRS places it on an
appropriate host or generates a recommendation, depending on the automation level you choose.
Automation levels, also known as migration thresholds, range from conservative to aggressivevCenter
applies DRS recommendations that provide even a slight improvement to the clusters overall load
balance. DRS offers five automation levels to fit your needs on a per cluster basis.
Automated Load Balancing: DRS spreads the virtual machine workloads across vSphere hosts inside a
cluster and monitors available resources for you. Based on your automation level, DRS will migrate
(vMotion) virtual machines to other hosts within the cluster to maximize performance.
Optimized Power Consumption: When you enable DPM, it compares cluster- and host-level capacity to
virtual machine demand, including recent historical demand, and places hosts in standby mode. Should
capacity demands increase, DPM powers on hosts in standby to absorb the additional workload. You can
also set DPM to issue recommendations but take no actions.

3. vMotion
Live migrations: VMware vSphere live migration allows you to move an entire running virtual machine
from one physical server to another, without downtime. The virtual machine retains its network identity
and connections, ensuring a seamless migration process. Transfer the virtual machine's active memory
and precise execution state over a high-speed network, allowing the virtual machine to switch from
running on the source vSphere host to the destination vSphere host. This entire process takes less than
two seconds on a gigabit Ethernet network.
Automate and Schedule Migrations: you can schedule migrations at any time
Using the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS): VMFS allows multiple installations of VMware ESX to
access the same virtual machine files concurrently.
Storage vMotion Integration: you can live-migrate an entire virtual machine between hosts, between
clusters or between data centers without disruption or shared storage between the involved hosts.
Preserving Network State: The underlying vSphere host virtualizes the networks used by the virtual
machine. This ensures that even after the migration, the virtual machine network identity and network
connections are preserved no downtime.
Transaction Integrity: vMotion can transfer the active memory and precise execution state of the virtual
machine over a high-speed network, allowing it to switch from running on the source vSphere host to
the destination vSphere host. VMotion keeps the transfer period imperceptible to users by tracking on-
going memory transactions in a bitmap. Once the entire memory and system state has been copied to
the target vSphere host, vMotion suspends the source virtual machine, copies the bitmap to the target
vSphere host and resumes the virtual machine on the target vSphere host, thus ensuring transaction
integrity.

AVAILABILITY
VMware vSphere vMotion allows you to migrate live virtual machines from one vSphere host to
another with no impact on end users.
VMware vSphere Storage vMotion lets you move virtual machine disk files from one datastore to
another without disrupting service to the end user.

High Availability (HA) provides easy-to-use, cost effective high availability for applications running in
virtual machines. In the event of physical server failure, affected virtual machines are automatically
restarted on other servers with spare capacity. In the case of operating system failure, vSphere HA
restarts the affected virtual machine on the same physical server.
1. Scalability:
- Master-slave node relationship - This new relationship model between nodes in
a cluster replaces primary and secondary nodes. Availability actions are
coordinated by a single master node, which communicates all activities and
states to VMware vCenter Server. This eliminates much of the planning
required to design a highly available environmentadministrators no longer
need to worry about which hosts are primary nodes and where they are located.
- Support for IPv6 networking - Enables IT departments in need of a larger
address space to fully leverage their network infrastructure.
- Simple deployment mechanism - Fast and easy completion of routine tasks
such as deploying vSphere HA agent and configuring HA functionality.
2. Reliability:
- No external component dependencies - HA has no dependency upon DNS
resolution. This reduces the odds that an external component outage will
impact HA operations.
- Multiple communication paths - HA nodes within a cluster can communicate
through the storage subsystem as well as over the management network.
Multiple communication paths increase redundancy
3. Usability: HAs enhanced interface lets users quickly identify the role and state of each
node in a cluster. Error condition messages are also easier to understand and act upon.
In the rare case that an issue does occur with HA, only one log file needs to be reviewed,
speeding time to resolution.

Data protection:
Data Protection is deployed as a virtual appliance with four processors (vCPUs) and four GB of RAM.
Three configurations of backup storage capacity are available: 0.5 TB, 1 TB and 2 TB, which consume 850
GB, 1,300 GB and 3,100 GB of storage capacity, respectively. Careful planning is recommended to ensure
proper sizing, as additional capacity cannot be added once the appliance is deployed. Base your storage
requirements on the number of virtual machines to be backed up, the data quantities involved,
retention periods and typical data change rates, all of which can vary considerably.
vSphere Data Protection uses CBT (changed block tracking) during image-level backups. CBT also comes
into play during virtual machine image-level restores to improve speed and efficiency. During the
restore process, vSphere Data determine which blocks have changed since the selected restore
point. vSphere Data Protection automatically evaluates the workload between both restore methods
restoring all blocks or calculating and restoring only the changed blocksand uses the most efficient
method.
Virtual machines can be restored to a different location and/or renamed as part of the restore process.
You also have the option to power-on a virtual machine after restore and disconnect it from the
network, making it easy to conduct "restore rehearsals" to verify that virtual machines are protected
and data can be restored if needed. (Note that CBT is not used when restoring a virtual machine to an
alternate location.)
Variable-length de-duplication - Breaks files into sub-segments to determine which are unique,
minimizing backup storage requirements. Achieves the industrys highest average rates of de-
duplication: 99 percent for file systems and 96 percent for databases.
Global de-duplication - Reduces required backup storage further by de-duplicating data across all virtual
machines pointed to the same appliance.
Changed Block Tracking backup (CBT) - Works with variable-length de-duplication to reduce virtual
network impact during backups, sending only daily unique changes to the virtual appliance.
Changed Block Tracking restore - Unlike other solutions, vSphere Data Protection also uses CBT during
restores for dramatic reductions in data recovery times.
Fault Tolerance:
provides continuous availability for applications in the event of server failures by creating a live shadow
instance of a virtual machine that is always up-to-date with the primary virtual machine.
After failover, vSphere FT automatically creates a new, secondary virtual machine to deliver continuous
protection for the application.
Replication:
copies only changed blocks to the recovery site. This approach lowers bandwidth utilization and enables
more aggressive recovery point objectives (RPOs) than manual, full-system virtual machine replication
- Hypervisor-Level Virtual Machine Replication: Changed blocks in the virtual
machine disk(s) for a running virtual machine at a primary site are sent to a
secondary site. There, they are applied to the virtual machine disks for the
offline (protection) copy of the virtual machine.
- Agent-Based Replication Management: vSphere Replication includes an agent
inside the core vSphere installation package on each host, plus a set of virtual
appliances that are deployed from the management interface. The agent sends
changed data from a running virtual machine to the appliance at a remote site;
the appliance then adds the replication to the offline disk files for that virtual
machine.
- Virtual Machine Synchronization and Seed Copies: vSphere Replication will do
an initial synchronization of the source virtual machine and its replica copy. If
desired, a seed copy of data can be placed at the destination to minimize the
time and bandwidth required for the first replication.
- Intelligent Transfers: After baseline synchronization is complete, vSphere
Replication will transfer only those blocks of data that have changed. This keeps
network traffic to a minimum, unique data only requires sending once. Only
changes will be replicated and sent to the target locations vSphere Replication
appliance.
App HA:
new feature that complements the functionality of VMware vSphere High Availability with application-
level monitoring and automated remediation. App HA improves application uptime through:
Policy-based application monitoring and remediation
Integration with vSphere HA to provide multiple recovery options, e.g. restart the application
service or restart the virtual machine
App HA Policies: Policies define items such as the number of times App HA will attempt to restart a
service, number of minutes it will wait for the service to start, the option to reset the virtual machine if
the service fails to start, and reset the virtual machine when the service is unstable.

STORAGE
A virtual machine is stored as a set of files in its own directory in a datastore, which is a logical container,
like a file system, that hides the specifics of each storage device and provides a uniform model for
storing virtual machine files. Datastores can also be used for storing ISO images, virtual machine
templates and floppy images.
VMware vSphere VMFS allows multiple vSphere servers to access shared virtual machine storage
concurrently and enables virtualization-based distributed architecture services to operate across a
cluster of vSphere servers. It provides the foundation for scaling virtualization beyond the boundaries of
a single system.
1. Storage Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS): Provides intelligent virtual machine placement
and load balancing mechanisms based on I/O latency and storage capacity.
2. Profile-Driven Storage: Reduces the number of storage resource selection steps by grouping
storage according to user-defined policies.
- Dynamic Storage Provisioning: Using Profile-Driven Storage, various storage
characteristics, including SLA, availability and performance, can be requested in
a virtual machine storage profile. These profiles are used to ensure that only
those datastores or datastore clusters that are compliant with the virtual
machine storage profile are made available.
- Virtual Machine Compliance Status: vSphere provides a single pane of glass to
check compliance of all virtual machines and the associated virtual disks,
ensuring that even administrators who dont necessarily have access to all the
different layers can validate compliance on the virtual machine summary.
3. Storage vMotion: Performs proactive, non-disruptive storage migrations, eliminating virtual
machine storage I/O bottlenecks and freeing up valuable storage capacity.
4. Storage I/O Control: Prioritizes storage access by continuously monitoring the I/O load of a
storage volume and dynamically allocating available I/O resources to virtual machines according
to business needs.
5. Virtual Machine File System (VMFS): Allows multiple vSphere hosts to read and write to the
same storage concurrently and supports all common storage interconnects for block-based
storage (DASD, Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI and NAS).
6. Storage Thin Provisioning: Allow administrators to dedicate more capacity to virtual machines
than they have. Eliminate the need to dedicate full capacity upfront.
- Thick vs. Thin Virtual Disk Provisioning: Thin Provisioning allows virtual
machines on vSphere hosts to provision the entire space required for the disks
current and future activities, but only commits as much storage space needed to
store data. It cuts out the space thats allocated but not used and grows as more
data is stored in the virtual disk. In thick format, all of the needed storage space
is committed from the outset. vSphere Thin Provisioning lets you overcommit
the datastores. This increases storage utilization by cutting down the amount of
space that is allocated but not used.
7. Storage APIs: Enhances your storage awareness, data protection and array integration and takes
advantage of multi-pathing capabilities offered by third-party storage vendors.
8. vSphere Flash Read Cache: Virtualizes server-side flash, providing a high performance read
cache layer that dramatically lowers application latency. The caching is fully transparent to the
VM without requiring any guest agents.