To Grasp the Cloud—Fundamental Concepts - Deploying and Managing a Cloud Infrastructure - page 41

vSphere Virtual Distributed Switch
Managing the network backbone for a medium- to large-scale data center offering a host
of virtualized servers would not be feasible with traditional approaches to implementing
and managing the network connections between the servers within a data center.
The vSphere Virtual distributed switch enables provisioning, administering, and monitor-
ing virtual machines networks within a data center as well as across physically distributed
data centers. The virtual distributed switch, or VDS, automates network configuration and
deployment for a virtualized data center. The VDS can also connect with software-defined
networking (SDN) configurations, which reduces operational efforts to plug a third-party
SDN into vSphere.
The primary value add of VDS is its ability to treat the whole data center as a single
resource pool and hence enable centralized network implementation, configuration, and
management.
vSphere Storage vMotion
Even though migrating a virtual machine from one physical server to another is a pretty
standard feature in every enterprise-grade hypervisor offering, the vMotion feature of
vSphere can migrate a virtual machine while it's live, which would mean zero down-
time when migrating virtual machines within a data center or even across data centers.
Migration is OS agnostic and supports all major operating systems.
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V
Hyper-V is Microsoft's enterprise-grade hypervisor solution for the desktop and data center
virtualization markets. Hyper-V currently supports Windows-based hosts and guests, and
it can virtualize x86-based servers.
Hyper-V has a client-server deployment scheme, where guest nodes (physically on the
same or different server) access applications deployed on the Hyper-V server node as if they
are running natively on the guest nodes or virtual machines.
Consumer vs. Enterprise Use
Most of the hypervisor products, both open source and proprietary, target a niche set of
verticals and can broadly be categorized as those targeting consumer use cases and those
targeting large enterprise use cases. In the following sections, we'll detail some of the use
cases for both consumers and enterprises.
Hypervisors for the Mobile Devices
This is currently not the biggest chunk of consumer use cases for hypervisors, but
it is definitely one that will define the future of hypervisors getting into the hands of
consumers—or IT workforce.