My eye starts twitching when I see fancy marketing terminology, so I have taken a slightly overdue relook at the VMware stack.
And stack is the first answer to my question, VSphere is essentially a stack of software, mostly updated versions of existing VMware products but some new and worthy of attention.
- ESX and ESXi: ESX(i) is the foundation to it all, it’s the hypervisor and the (i) version strips off the service console to make it even leaner.
- vMotion: This arguably was the killer feature in earlier versions that got our attention, the ability to move virtual servers around without taking them down. Now enter Storage vMotion, the ability to move the storage associated with a Virtual Machine to a different part of the SAN again without taking it down.
- DRS: This has been around a while but I am not sure if early VMware adopters have taken to it as readily as later ones. Essentially it smoothes out the peaks and troughs so if a VM is being demanding it can be automatically moved to a host that has more of the contended resource. This also started to address concerns about having all ones eggs in one basket as if you could predict a failure via monitoring instrumentation DRS can proactively do something about it.
- Fault Tolerance: For those of you who read the last bullet and said ‘yeah but hang on what if it just fails with no time to vMotion’. This feature clones your VM and everything that happens to the prime happens to the clone. The game plan being if the primary VM dies the clone seamlessly takes over. Obvious overhead on resources here so possibly reserved for ones most critical basket of eggs.
- VMware Backup: For those servers that struggle to tolerate the performance hit during a backup cycle the server can have a snapshot taken and directly assigned to the Backup Server. This sounds great and I would like to be a fly on the wall in the storage team meeting who I suspect will wish to see that sort of activity driven at the backend.
- VShield: Something for the network and security guys who should look at new firewalling and traffic flow monitoring across virtual switches.
and Finally
- VCentre Orchestrator: This I suspect is an enhanced version of the product VMware purchased from a Swiss outfit called Dunes. I had the pleasure of going to see them in Lausanne a few years ago and those interested in autonomics in the virtual estate should take the time to master this product.
So is VSphere marketing hype? Probably. Are the subproducts beyond the brand worth evaluation? Absolutely