Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
only vendor selling production grade virtualization software, and they also created the features that
today, we expect every virtualization vendor to provide by default.
VMware's current server virtualization product set, vSphere, consists of two components:
the VMware vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, and the enterprise virtual environment
management platform, vSphere.
VMware's basic hypervisor software is available free of charge, even for production environments,
and it supports running and managing a reasonable number of virtual servers on it — not bad for
a free product. However, its feature set and manageability are quite limited when compared to
capabilities of the VMware tools designed for the enterprise; for example, it supports only 32GB of
memory in the physical host server. Nonetheless, for smaller environments or those new to
virtualization, this product is often sufi cient and can signii cantly reduce the deployment costs
associated with VMware's larger vSphere product.
To provide an enterprise-scale and feature-rich virtualization solution, VMware couples its
hypervisor with the vSphere management platform. This not only provides signii cantly more
management and reporting functionality, but also increases scalability and availability. The
other major difference is that groups of physical host servers running the VMware hypervisor are
managed collectively, blurring the boundaries between individual server resources and a cluster of
host servers as VMware refers to it.
While production environments can be deployed using just VMware's hypervisor, most of the businesses
I work with have invested in the vSphere infrastructure to get the fuller feature set not available in
the standalone hypervisor. The software is often expensive and it requires a strong commitment to
virtualization, but it has been successful enough to make VMware the size of company it is today.
That said, however, Microsoft is offering ever-increasing levels of virtualization functionality in the
Windows operating system, and VMware will be forced at some point to reconsider the cost models
and feature sets of its products.
NOTE
VMware was the i rst vendor to adopt a licensing model based on
memory size for its products, having decided that the traditional “per-CPU”
model traditionally used by the industry was becoming outdated in 2011. Such
a bold move wasn't entirely successful, however, and subsequent tweaking was
needed to appease a surprised marketplace.
Microsoft Hyper-V
Until very recently most of us probably didn't think of Microsoft as a virtualization software vendor
although they have in fact produced desktop virtualization software, such as VirtualPC and Virtual
Server, for a number of years now. Sadly for Microsoft, my experience showed they were the kind of
products that were loved by those who used them but unknown to everyone else.
First released as a role within Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V was intended to bring Microsoft's
new server virtualization capabilities to the massive Windows Server marketplace. This was an
excellent product marketing decision, as anyone new to and curious about server virtualization now
Search WWH ::
Custom Search