vSphere 4 New Features and Capabilities
The recent release of vSphere 4 has introduced a large number of new features and concepts. In this post, I'm going to highlight some of the cool new features and concepts that really set VMware ahead in the landscape of server virtualization.
Cloud Computing vs. VMware vCloud
One of my favorite quotes about cloud computing came from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison when he said, "Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?" Anyone who has followed the hype behind cloud computing can understand his confusion. Cloud computing has come to encompass SAAS, DAAS, utility computing, Web 2.0, grid computing, and a myriad of other buzzwords people have lumped into the cloud.
To many, clouds have been made into the panacea of where computing and administration are going. If you are an IT administrator, those promises start to fall flat when hard questions about security, manageability, and responsibility are asked:
- If I'm using a cloud, where is my data?
- I have all these auditors (SAS-70, PCI, etc.) asking to see my data center. Where do I send them?
- Billing per CPU cycle sounds great, but how much is my bill actually going to be?
Enter VMware with the vCloud product offering. vCloud allows you to maintain control of the infrastructure and still get the cloudy benefits of fast deployment, scalability and flexibility. Because the infrastructure is controlled by your organization, the data is as secure as you would like it to be. Auditors can complete on-site checks to ensure your compliance, because it is your infrastructure. True utilization of physical resources can easily be determined so you can forecast hardware purchases.
Green Computing
There's a reason so many companies are starting 'Green Computing' initiatives, and it isn't just because they all want to save the earth. Green Computing means less power usage, which equates to savings on the power bill, something everyone can get behind. If you have already moved to virtual servers, you have seen the difference. Moving physical servers to virtual has a dramatic effect on the power usage per rack. vSphere takes this even further by introducing technologies to reduce the power consumption of hosts in your infrastructure.
DPM will be supported in production, allowing the vCenter to power off inactive hosts and then bring capacity online as workload increases. This is possible because DPM is integrated with DRS, meaning no disruption or downtime to virtual machines.
VMware Fault Tolerance
VMware Fault Tolerance protects virtual machines from hardware failure, allowing for continuous availability. In the previous release of ESX, if there was a hardware failure, machines would come back online on a different host. This resulted in service disruption as the host booted up on the second ESX host.
Fault Tolerance creates two machines running in parallel on separate hosts. To the outside world, only one machine exists, but it's a fully redundant instance.
Unfortunately there are still some limits to the Fault Tolerance implementation. Only one VCPU is supported on the guest, and you'll need some high-speed networking (10G) to support it.
Hopefully, this technology will grow to overcome these limitations, because it's a potential game changer.
vNetwork Distributed Switches
vSphere has introduced an architecture that allows third parties to implement software switches. Cisco is the first company to come out with a software switch, known as the Nexus 1000V. This means that the networking of virtual machines can go back into the hands of network administrators. The Nexus 1000V provides the normal IOS, and you can telnet to it and manage it like a normal switch.
Summary
Hopefully this has given some insight into what VMware is up to with the new release of vSphere. Are you already using vSphere technologies in your environment? Did I leave out a cool technology that has changed the way you work? Comment below and let me know how you are using vSphere.
Further Reading
Is Amazon AWS really HIPAA compliant?
What does PCI compliance in the cloud really mean?
VMware vSphere
vSphere Key Features
Cisco Nexus 1000V