Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
ordering hardware, waiting on the hardware to arrive, racking and cabling the equipment
once it arrived, installing the operating system and patching it with the latest updates, and
then installing the application. The time frame for all these steps ranged anywhere from a
few days to a few months and was typically a couple of weeks. Now, with VMware vSphere
in place, the IT team can use vCenter Server's templates functionality to build a VM, install
the operating system, and apply the latest updates, and then rapidly clone—or copy—this
VM to create additional VMs. Now their provisioning time is down to hours, likely even min-
utes. Chapter 10 discusses this functionality in detail.
Scenario 2
Empowered by the IT team's ability to quickly respond to the needs of this new
business initiative, XYZ Corporation is moving ahead with deploying updated versions of a
line-of-business application. However, the business leaders are a bit concerned about upgrad-
ing the current version. Using the snapshot functionality present in ESXi and vCenter Server,
the IT team can take a “point-in-time picture” of the VM so that if something goes wrong
during the upgrade, it's a simple rollback to the snapshot for recovery. Chapter 9, “Creating
and Managing Virtual Machines,” discusses snapshots.
Scenario 3
XYZ Corporation is impressed with the IT team and vSphere's functionality
and is now interested in expanding its use of virtualization. In order to do so, however, a
hardware upgrade is needed on the servers currently running ESXi. The business is worried
about the downtime that will be necessary to perform the hardware upgrades. The IT team
uses vMotion to move VMs off one host at a time, upgrading each host in turn without incur-
ring any downtime to the company's end users. Chapter 12 discusses vMotion in more depth.
Scenario 4
After the great success it has had virtualizing its infrastructure with vSphere,
XYZ Corporation now i nds itself in need of a new, larger shared storage array. vSphere's sup-
port for Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS gives XYZ room to choose the most cost-effective stor-
age solution available, and the IT team uses Storage vMotion to migrate the VMs without any
downtime. Chapter 12 discusses Storage vMotion.
These scenarios begin to provide some idea of the benei ts that organizations see when virtu-
alizing with an enterprise-class virtualization solution like VMware vSphere.
What Do I Virtualize with VMware vSphere?
Virtualization, by its very nature, means that you are going to take multiple operating systems—
such as Microsoft Windows, Linu x, Solaris, or Novell NetWare—and run them on a single physical
server. While VMware vSphere off ers broad support for virtualizing a wide range of operating
systems, it would be almost impossible for us to discuss how virtualization impacts all the diff er-
ent versions of all the diff erent operating systems that vSphere supports.
Because the majority of organizations that adopt vSphere are primarily virtualizing Microsoft
Windows, that operating system will receive the majority of attention when it comes to describ-
ing procedures that must occur within a virtualized operating system. You will see coverage of
tasks for a virtualized installation of Linux as well, but the majority of the coverage will be for
Microsoft Windows.
If you are primarily virtualizing something other than Microsoft Windows, VMware provides
more in-depth information on all the operating systems it supports and how vSphere interacts
with those operating systems on its website at
www.vmware.com.
