Mastering VMware vSphere 6. Marshall Nick

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ Identify the role of each product in the vSphere product suite

      • Recognize the interaction and dependencies between the products in the vSphere suite

      • Understand how vSphere differs from other virtualization products

      Exploring VMware vSphere 6.0

      The VMware vSphere product suite is a comprehensive collection of products and features that together provide a full array of enterprise virtualization functionality. The vSphere product suite includes the following products and features:

      • VMware ESXi

      • VMware vCenter Server

      • vSphere Update Manager

      • VMware vSphere Desktop Client and vSphere Web Client

      • VMware vRealize Orchestrator

      • vSphere Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing

      • vSphere vMotion and Storage vMotion

      • vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

      • vSphere Storage DRS

      • Storage I/O Control and Network I/O Control

      • Storage-Based Policy Management (SBPM)

      • vSphere High Availability (HA)

      • vSphere Symmetric Multi-Processing Fault Tolerance (SMP-FT)

      • vSphere Storage APIs

      • VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN)

      • vSphere Replication

      • vSphere Flash Read Cache

      • vSphere Content Library

      Rather than waiting to introduce these products and features in their own chapters, I will introduce each product or feature in the following sections. This will allow us to explain how each one affects the design, installation, and configuration of your virtual infrastructure. After I cover the features and products in the vSphere suite, you’ll have a better grasp of how each of them fits into the design and the big picture of virtualization.

      Certain products outside the vSphere product suite extend the vSphere product line with new functionality. These additional products include VMware Horizon View, VMware vRealize Automation, and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, just to name a few. VMware even offers bundles of vSphere and these other products in the vCloud Suite to make it easier for users to purchase and consume the products in their environments. However, because of the size and scope of these products, they are not covered in this book.

      As of this writing, VMware vSphere 6.0 is the latest release of the VMware vSphere product family. This book covers functionality found in version 6.0. Where possible, I’ve tried to note differences between vSphere versions. For detailed information on other vSphere versions, refer to the previous books in the Mastering VMware vSphere series, also published by Sybex.

To help simplify navigation and to help you find information on the breadth of products and features in the vSphere product suite, I’ve prepared Table 1.1, which contains cross-references to where you can find more information about a particular product or feature elsewhere in the book.

Table 1.1 Product and feature cross-references

      First we’ll look at the products that make up the VMware vSphere suite, and then we’ll examine the major features. Let’s start with the products in the suite, beginning with VMware ESXi.

      Examining the Products in the vSphere Suite

      In the following sections, I’ll describe and review the products found in the vSphere product suite.

      VMware ESXi

      The core of the vSphere product suite is the hypervisor, which is the virtualization layer that serves as the foundation for the rest of the product line. In vSphere 5 and later, including vSphere 6.0, the hypervisor comes solely in the form of VMware ESXi.

      Longtime users of VMware vSphere may recognize this as a shift in the way VMware provides the hypervisor. Prior to vSphere 5, the hypervisor was available in two forms: VMware ESX and VMware ESXi. Although both products shared the same core virtualization engine, supported the same set of virtualization features, leveraged the same licenses, and were considered bare-metal installation hypervisors (also referred to as Type 1 hypervisors; see the sidebar “Type 1 and Type 2 Hypervisors”), there were still notable architectural differences. In VMware ESX, VMware used a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) – derived Service Console to provide an interactive environment through which users could interact with the hypervisor. The Linux-based Service Console also included services found in traditional operating systems, such as a firewall, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agents, and a web server.

      Type 1 and Type 2 Hypervisors

      Hypervisors are generally grouped into two classes: Type 1 hypervisors and Type 2 hypervisors. Type 1 hypervisors run directly on the system hardware and thus are often referred to as bare-metal hypervisors. Type 2 hypervisors require a host operating system, and the host operating system provides I/O device support and memory management. VMware ESXi is a Type 1 bare-metal hypervisor. (In earlier versions of vSphere, VMware ESX was also considered a Type 1 bare-metal hypervisor.) Other Type 1 bare-metal hypervisors include KVM (part of the open source Linux kernel), Microsoft Hyper-V, and products based on the open source Xen hypervisor like Citrix XenServer and Oracle VM.

      VMware ESXi, on the other hand, is the next generation of the VMware virtualization foundation. Unlike VMware ESX, ESXi installs and runs without the Linux-based Service Console. This gives ESXi an ultralight footprint of approximately 130MB. Despite the lack of the Service Console, ESXi provides all the same virtualization features that VMware ESX supported in earlier versions. Of course, ESXi 6.0 has been enhanced from earlier versions to support even more functionality, as you’ll see in this and future chapters.

The key reason that VMware ESXi is able to support the same extensive set of virtualization functionality as VMware ESX without the Service Console is that the core of the virtualization functionality wasn’t (and still isn’t) found in the Service Console. It’s the VMkernel that is the foundation of the virtualization process. It’s the VMkernel that manages the virtual machines’ access to the underlying physical hardware by providing CPU scheduling, memory management, and virtual switch data processing. Figure 1.1 shows the structure of VMware ESXi.

Figure 1.1 The VMkernel is the foundation of the virtualization functionality found in VMware ESXi.

I mentioned earlier that VMware ESXi 6.0 is enhanced, and one such area of enhancement is in the configuration limits of what the hypervisor can support. Table 1.2 shows the configuration maximums for the last few versions of VMware ESX/ESXi.

Table 1.2 VMware ESXi maximums

      These are just some of the configuration maximums. Where appropriate, future chapters will СКАЧАТЬ