VMware vSphere Features

What is a thin provisioned disk?

When creating a virtual disk file, by default, VMware ESX uses a thick type of virtual disk. The thick disk pre-allocates all of the space specified during the creation of the disk. For example, if you create a 10 megabyte disk, all 10 megabytes are pre-allocated for that virtual disk.

In contrast, a thin virtual disk does not pre-allocate all of the space. Blocks in the VMDK file are not allocated and backed by physical storage until they are written during the normal course of business. A read to an unallocated block returns zeroes, but not back the block with physical storage until it is written.

Update Manager

Simplify VMware vSphere management by automating patches and updates. vSphere Update Manager makes it easy to manage tracking and patching of vSphere hosts.

• Keep machines up to date and in compliance

• Reduce risks of patching

• Eliminate vSphere downtime related to host patching

vMotion

vSphere vMotion enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability and complete transaction integrity. vMotion is a key enabling technology for creating the dynamic, automated and self-optimizing datacenter.

Storage vMotion

Perform live migration of virtual machine disk files within and across storage arrays with vSphere Storage vMotion. Relocate virtual machine disk files while maintaining continuous service availability and complete transaction integrity.

Storage APIs

VMware vSphere provides an API and SDK environment to allow customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to enhance and extend the functionality of vSphere in the following areas:

• Storage Awareness

• Array Integration

• Multipathing

• Data protection

Replication

Replicates powered-on virtual machines over the network from one vSphere host to another without needing storage array-based native replication. vSphere Replication provides a number of unique advantages

Reduce bandwidth needs
Eliminate storage lock-in
Build flexible disaster recovery configurations


Fault Tolerance  

vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) provides continuous availability for applications in the event of server failures by creating a live shadow instance of a virtual machine that is in virtual lockstep with the primary instance. By allowing instantaneous failover between the two instances in the event of hardware failure, FT eliminates even the smallest chance of data loss or disruption.



Automatically trigger seamless stateful failover when the protected virtual machines fail to respond for zero downtime, zero data loss continuous availability
Automatically trigger the creation of a new secondary virtual machine after failover, to ensure continuous protection to the application

Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS), Distributed Power Management (DPM)

vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) continuously monitors utilization across vSphere servers and intelligently allocates available resources among virtual machines according to business needs.

vSphere Distributed Power Management (DPM) continuously optimizes power consumption in the datacenter. When virtual machines in a DRS cluster need fewer resources, such as during nights and weekends, DPM consolidates workloads onto fewer servers and powers off the rest to reduce power consumption. When virtual machine resource requirements increase, DPM brings powered-down hosts back online to ensure service levels are met.

Data Protection

Many backup products write their data to tape, which is great for long-term archiving but often difficult and time-consuming to restore. vSphere Data Protection (VDP) protects against data loss in your virtual environment by enabling fast backups to disk and, more importantly, fast and complete recovery.


vShield Zones - Secure vSphere Deployments

vShield Zones provides basic protection from network-based threats in virtual datacenters. The solution is included with most VMware vSphere packages and offers an application firewall with policies based on basic traffic information. vShield Zones is deployed per vSphere host.

• Get visibility and control over network communications between virtual machines

• Improve hardware resource utilization while implementing application security

• Simplify compliance with comprehensive logging of all virtual machine network activity

vShield Endpoint

Leverage existing investments and manage antivirus and anti-malware policies for virtualized environments with the same management interfaces you use to secure physical environments. VMware vShield™ Endpoint strengthens security in VMware vSphere and VMware View environments while improving performance for endpoint protection by orders of magnitude, offloading antivirus and anti-malware agent processing to a dedicated secure virtual appliance delivered by VMware partners

High Availability (HA)

VMware vSphere 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 production servers with spare capacity. In the case of operating system failure, vSphere HA restarts the affected virtual machine on the same physical server.