Which VMware product should I use? (3) VMware datacenter product, VI 3 basic

VMware Infrastructure 3 is a suite of industry-leading infrastructure datacenter virtualization software that virtualizes servers, storage and networking, allowing multiple unmodified operating systems and their applications to run independently in virtual machines while sharing physical resources. The suite delivers comprehensive virtualization, management, resource optimization, application availability and operational automation capabilities. A virtual infrastructure lets you share your physical resources of multiple machines across your entire infrastructure. A virtual machine lets you share the resources of a single physical computer across multiple virtual machines for maximum efficiency. Resources are shared across multiple virtual machines and applications.

Virtualization Infrastructure dramatically improves the efficiency and availability of resources and applications, and gets the flexibility you need to build and sustain your competitive advantage while reducing infrastructure costs. Internal resources are underutilized under the old “one server, one application” model. VMware Infrastructure delivers resources, applications—even servers—when and where they’re needed. The customers typically save on the overall IT costs by consolidating their resource pools and delivering highly available machines to users. The Virtualization Infrastructure will reduce capital costs by requiring less hardware and lowering operational costs while increasing your server usability, ensure the enterprise applications perform with the highest availability and performance, build up business continuity through improved disaster recovery solutions and deliver high availability throughout the datacenter, and improve desktop management with faster deployment of desktops and fewer support calls due to application conflicts.

The basic VI 3 can set up in the following. As my personal experience, it is good enough for the everyday usage of a small organization.

ESX(ESXi): In this infrastructure, each physical machine installs an ESX (ESXi) bare metal product. The ESX(ESXi) takes the responsibilities of managing the whole physical machines and supports multiple virtual machines. In the VMware virtual concept, each virtual machine is a file, so in the ESX, the file system is VMFS. Virtual SMP enables you to have a single virtual machine use up to four physical processors simultaneously.

VMware vCenter is the management server in the VMware Infrastructure. vCenter intelligently optimizes resources, ensures high availability to all applications in virtual machines and makes your IT environment more responsive with virtualization-based distributed services such as VMware DRS, VMware High Availability (HA), VMware Consolidated Backup and VMware VMotion. Here are examples of the vCenter benefit:

Storage: In order to enable the advance functions in vCenter, SAN storage is required. All the virtual machines will share the same storages; even each physical machine has its own local storage. The virtual machines are independent.

Which VMware product should I use? (2) VMware desktop product.

There are three kinds of VMware products we can choose:
Customer Desktop Technology
Technical Desktop Technology
Enterprise Desktop Technology

1. Customer Desktop Technology
It is for the single user who wants to run software which is developed for different OSes on a single physical machine, and no needs to develop the software. Usually, we will only deploy one virtual machine in a single physical machine, because of the capability of customer desktop technology. In order to achieve this objective, the user will install VMware customer desktop product on existing OS, then import the OS required by the software to run the applications. For example, easily run Windows’ applications on your Mac, including high end games and other graphic applications, with VMware Fusion. Run Windows and Linux applications on Windows or Linux PCs with the free VMware Player.

2. Technical Desktop Technology
It is for the developers to reduce development time and reduce the QA and support costs. Consolidate multiple development and test workstations onto a single physical system by running multiple virtual machines. In order to achieve these goals, the developers have to install the technical desktop product on existing OS, then create multiple virtual machines. For example, one virtual machine for QA, one virtual machine for development, and one virtual machine for performance testing. VMware Workstation is a kind of technical desktop product, we can record and replay virtual machine activity to capture, diagnose, and resolve non-deterministic bugs and race conditions. On the development machine, if we mess up on one stage, we can easily go back to the last safe stage by using snapshot function and avoid the huge effort of roll back.

3. Enterprise Desktop Technology
This technology is used by the enterprises who have a lot of branches in different locations. Organizations use enterprise desktop technology to manage and support the needs of their extended, global workforce while strengthening security and control over corporate resources and sensitive information. VMware View (formerly VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)) lets organizations streamline desktop management & control, reduce operating costs and deliver complete desktop environments with greater application compatibility. VMware View is based on the Virtual Infrastructure 3, and it provides customerlized desktops to remote workers and is managed in local service center. Using VI3 in this way enables an IT organization to run multiple, unique, isolated virtual desktops on one physical server. These virtual desktops are made up of a single-user copy of OS as well as typical PC applications, and they present to the user an environment that looks, feels, and operates exactly like a standalone PC. Users access these virtual desktops through local devices such as thin clients, diskless PCs, or even regular PCs that are located on an individual user’s desk. Because these virtual desktops are actually running within the tightly managed and more easily controlled environment of the datacenter, they bring together many of the advantages of the centralized and decentralized computing models.

which VMware product should I use? (1) VMware products

Now I will talk a little bit about the VMware products. The customers need to select products according to their special requirements. It is not cheap to buy the whole package. We have to use our money wisely.

The VMware once provided its products in three categories: Desktop products, datacenter products and management products. In the new release, the management products have been merged into the datacenter products category since most management products users will use these products in the datacenter. The desktop products include: VMware Fusion, VMware ThinkApp, VMware ACE, VMware Workstation, VMware MVP(not available now), VMware Player and VMware View. The datacenter product include: VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware vCenter Server, VMware ESX(ESXi), VMware Server, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, VMware vCenter Lab Manager, VMware Capacity Planner, VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager, VMware vCenter Stage Manger, VMware vCenter AppSpeed, and VMware vCenter Converter. Some other VMware products are also provided to the customers, but not as part of product line, such as VMware VMark for the performance, and VIMA, VMware RCLI and VMware Perl Tool kit for the development.

The virtualization products

Virtualization software products can be divided in two groups: 1) Hosted and 2) Bare Metal.

Hosted products require a general purpose OS to be running directly on the hardware, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The Mircosoft Hyper-V product and VMware workstation, VMware server are hosted products. The bare metal products released by VMware are ESXi and ESX Servers.
In host environment, the virtualization layer needs to provide both OS specific user-level components to access the general purpose OS, and kernel components to build virtual environment. The virtualization overhead is higher on this model because every I/O operation needs to go through a general purpose OS.

In bare metal product, the virtualization overhead is much lower since the I/O operation will be on the hardware directly.
Since the performance concern, I would use the hosted virtualization products on my desktop, and bare metal products for enterprise usage.
The popular hosted products are:
1. VMware Workstation: It is targeted to power users and developers. The concept is quite like the Windows workstation: it can perform most of the virtual features, but it only focus on one virtual machine.
2. VMware Server: It allows installing and running multiple VMs on a small server. The customer can control multiple servers remotely via a remote client. This product is targeted to small environments, mostly development and testing. The concept of VMware server is quite similar to Windows server: it focus on multiple virtual machines, and provide services for all the virtual machines. It should be all right to support 2~8 virtual machines, but if we have more virtual machines, the performance will be hugely impacted by the indirect accessing hardware.
3. VMware Fusion: this is the only VMware product for the Macintosh. It allows the user to run
Windows, Linux or any other supported OS as a virtual machine on a Mac. It includes several
advanced features not available on other products such as complete application integration with the Mac OS look-and-feel.
4. VMware Player: Free product and it allows users to run-only virtual machine created in other VMware products such as Workstation or Server. It does not have many management functions as other VMware product, but it is a good product for less powerful machines.

5. Windows Hyper-V: I would describe it as the prodcut in the same level as VMware server. Basically it is a windows OS with capability to run other OS. It is all right to run multiple Virtual Machines, but when come to more virtual machines, the performance degrade dramatially.
Since the bare metal products are mostly used on enterprise, and used as IT infrastructure , it always goes with Virtualization Infrastructure. I will spend more effort on these bare metal products in the later articles. The current popular bare metal products are:
1. VMware ESX: It is very scalable, and have a lot of fancy features. It typically has better performance than hosted products. The number of Virtual Machines in one physical server is much higher.
2. VMware ESXi: It is free! ESXi is a thin version of ESX. It almost has the same features as ESX, but spends less amount of system resources: It only uses 32M harddrive. It is a perfect version to play with. The ESXi does not have the host console as ESX, so the virtualization client needs to be downloaded by customers to manage the virtual host and virtual machines.

What is Virtualization

Virtualization is a technology that is changing the IT deployment and the way that people use servers. Current powerful computer hardware was designed to run a single operating system and a single application. However, this leaves most machines vastly underutilized. Each virtual machines can run different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical computer. Virtualization technology can lets you run multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine, and sharing the resources of that single computer across multiple platforms.
In the market, we can find two major branches of products: Microsoft Virtualization with Hyper-V, and VMware Virtualization.
VMware products provides a virtualized set of hardware to the guest OS. The hardware includes video adapters, network adapters, and hard drive adapters. The virtual host can also provides pass-through drivers for guest USB, serial, and parallel devices. The virtual machines become highly portable between computers, because every host looks identical to the guests OS. A systems administrator can pause operations on a virtual machine guest, move or copy that guest OS to another physical computer, and there resume execution exactly at the point of suspension. VMotion product allows the virtual host to move a running virtual machine from one virtual host to another.
Microsoft Hyper-V is also called as Windows Server Virtualization, is a hypervisor-based virtualization system for x86 64bits systems. In Hyper-V, a partition is a logical unit which is supported by the hypervisor.
A hypervisor instance has to have at least one parent partition, running Windows Server 2008. The virtualization stack runs in the parent partition and has direct access to the hardware devices. The parent partition then creates the child partitions which host the guest OSs. A child partition can also spawn further child partitions of their own. A parent partition creates child partitions using the hypercall API, which is the application programming interface exposed by Hyper-V.
Child partitions do not have direct access to hardware resources, but instead have a virtual device. Any request to the virtual devices is redirected via the VMBus to the devices in the parent partition, which will manage the requests.