Introduction to the VMWare products

The vPlatform is a virtualisation framework that enables the partitioning of the systems, their resource management and device independence for the sake of optimal usability and accessibility. With the help of the vPlatform products a mainframe-based system management running on Intel architecture can be realized.

• Mainframe-type virtual system modules
• Transparent to the users
• On-demand resource reservation
• Providing guaranteed service classes to systems and applications

VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise

The VMware ESX Server virtualisation framework can be used for the consolidation and partitioning of different services. It is very cost-efficient, easily scalable virtual system environment with advanced resource management capabilities.

• Server consolidation. It offers help for the consolidation of servers providing applications and basic tasks. The original servers may operate on even more types of operating systems.
• High availability, assurance of guaranteed service levels. The VMWare ESX Server enables the clustering of virtual servers within one device for development and testing methods, and there is a possibility to create clusters among devices as well. The VMWare ESX Server may guarantee CPU, memory, network bandwidth and data storage I/O resources for virtual systems.
• Development and testing. The VMWare ESX Server is virtual file system based, that way it offers the possibility to move filesystems freely, helping to develop realistic testing environments.

VMware Virtual SMP enables the virtual server to occupy the capacity of several processors. Within the limits of VMWare Virtual SMP the virtual server uses the processors in parallel, that way making the virtual systems accessible to and usable by high-demand resource-hungry applications.

While traditional file systems allow read/write access to the same file at the same time to only one server, the VMWare VMFS is a clustering filesystem that allows simultaneous usage of the storage area network (SAN) by the ESX Servers. It supports individual, virtualisation based capacities such as the migration of continuously operating virtual systems from one physical machine to another, restarting virtual systems that stopped because of an error on a separated physical server, and clustering virtual systems operating on different physical machines.

The VirtualCenter Agent enables the connection of ESX Servers to the central management interface (VMWare VirtualCenter Management Server 2), which is indispensable for the sake of realization of a central administration.

vMotion provides almost 100% availability. It offers solutions for the fast re-configuration of systems, and resource optimization in the virtual system, because the changes take effect immediately (without stopping). The running virtual system in use can be migrated to another physical server which is connected to the same SAN as the previous one without disrupting (stopping) the services.

VMware HA provides comprehensive, cost-effective fail-over protection within the virtualised environment. It provides high availability for running applications which would run without protection outside the virtualised environment. It automatically detects server errors by utilising the "heartbeat" script. With the continuous monitoring of the capacities it can provide sufficient resources to restart the services in case of an error on the server. It can automatically choose the optimal physical resources and restart the virtual systems inside the common resource pool on another physical server without human intervention.

With the help of the VMware DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) it is possible to dynamically allocate the available IT resources to the high priority applications. Based on experienced load indexes it is possible to create various rules and policies. Different dedicated resource pools can be designated to particular organisation-company entities, which the different entities can scale for their own purposes.

The VMware Consolidated Backup enables the LAN-independent back-up of virtual systems with the help of a central Windows 2003 backup-proxy server and a standardized backup-software (e.g. ARCServe). It also supports the complete or incremental backup of virtual systems, and even the complete virtual system image backup besides the central management of the backup.

VMware VirtualCenter Management Server 2 for VMware Infrastructure

It provides a central management interface for the virtual infrastructure: it is capable to manage hundreds of servers from one central location with the options of immediate intervention and constant supervision.

P2V Assistant 2 

VMWare P2V (Physical to Virtual) Assistant is an advanced migration tool that moves the existing physical system to a VMWare virtual device.

• Fast, simple migration to the virtual environment. There is no need for the re-installation or configuration of the applications, that way the migration can be done very fast.
• Quality assurance and troubleshooting. With the migration of the physical systems to a virtual device the given system can be placed to a special, detached environment. Troubleshooting, diagnostics and the configuration changes can be freely executed on the virtual devices, this way the modifications don't disturb the live systems. The virtual system can even be an exact copy of the complete system.
• Disaster recovery and and system backup. With the help of VMWare P2V Assistant the users can save the used systems to "off-line" virtual devices from time to time. The virtual device can be brought back up, that way the necessary time for the restoration process can be reduced to a very short time.

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You can read more about the products of VMWare here.