Built-In Service Level Controls for Applications
VMware vSphere™ application services provide built-in controls over application service levels such as availability, security and scalability, and can be enabled simply and uniformly for any application running inside VMware virtual machines.
Availability: Availability services allow IT to provide applications with varying levels of high availability depending on their priority and need, without the need for complex redundant hardware or clustering software.
- VMware VMotion eliminates the need to schedule application downtime due to scheduled server maintenance through live migration of virtual machines across servers with no disruption to users or loss of service.
- VMware Storage VMotion eliminates the need to schedule application downtime due to planned storage maintenance or during storage migrations by enabling live migration of virtual machine disks with no disruption to users or loss of service.
- VMware High Availability (HA) provides cost effective, automated restart within minutes for all applications in the event of hardware or operating system failures.
- VMware Fault Tolerance provides continuous availability, without any data loss or downtime, to any application, in the event of hardware failures
- VMware Data Recovery provides simple, cost effective, agentless backup and recovery for virtual machines.
Security: Security services allow IT to provide applications with appropriate level of enforcement of security policies in an operationally efficient way.
- VMware vShield Zones simplifies application security by enforcing corporate security policies at the application level in a shared environment, while still maintaining trust and network segmentation of users and sensitive data.
- VMware VMsafe enables the use of security products that work in conjunction with the virtualization layer to provide higher levels of security to virtual machines than even physical servers.
Scalability: Scalability services allow IT to deliver the right amount of resource to every application, based on its need, non disruptively.
- VMware DRS dynamically load balances server resources to deliver the right resource to the right application based on business priority; allowing applications to shrink and grow as needed
- Hot add enables CPU and memory to be added to virtual machines when needed without disruption or downtime.
- Hot plug enables virtual storage and network devices to be added to or removed from virtual machines without disruption or downtime.
- Hot extend of virtual disks allows virtual storage to be added to running virtual machines without disruption or downtime
vApps: Ensuring seamless application movement and choice between clouds
- VMware vSphere includes support for vApp, a logical entity comprising one or more virtual machines, which uses the industry standard Open Virtualization Format to specify and encapsulate all components of a multi-tier application as well as the operational policies and service levels associated with it.
- Just like the UPC bar code contains all information about a product, the vApp gives application owners a standard way to describe operational policies for an application which the cloud OS can automatically interpret and execute.
- vApps can comprise of any applications running on any OS, and provide a mechanism for customers to move their applications between internal clouds or external clouds with still the same service levels.
