What’s New with VMware Infrastructure
VMware innovations continue to make VMware Infrastructure the industry standard way of computing in datacenters of all sizes and across all industries. VMware Infrastructure is the most widely deployed virtualization platform allowing customers to:
- Manage IT infrastructure in the most efficient way
- Bring mainframe class availability and reliability to x86 datacenters
- Run the most demanding applications in a virtual environment
Updated packaging and pricing, including special bundled packages for Small and Medium Businesses, bring the VMware Infrastructure 3 benefits to serve organizations of any size.
Manage IT Infrastructure in the Most Efficient Way
VMware ESXi
- VMware’s next generation thin hypervisor integrated into the hardware that sets the standard for rapid, easy deployment and ongoing management
- Makes configuration as easy as setting up a home router appliance and allows users to be up and running with virtual machines in a matter of minutes
- Enables IT professionals to scale out virtual infrastructure on the fly through point-and-click addition of VMware ESX hardware hosts to existing resource pools
Guided Consolidation
- Enhancement to VirtualCenter intended for use in smaller environments
- Guides new virtualization users through the consolidation process in a wizard-based, tutorial-like fashion
- Allows first time virtualization users to get started and achieve the benefits of server consolidation faster than ever before
- Leverages capacity planning capabilities to discover physical servers, analyze their performance and trigger the conversion of these physical systems into virtual machines and intelligently places them on the most appropriate VMware ESX or VMware Server hosts
VMware Update Manager
- Automates patch and update management for VMware ESX hosts and select Microsoft and Linux virtual machines
- Addresses one of the most significant pain points for every IT department - tracking patch levels and manually applying the latest security/bug fixes
- Integrates with DRS to ensure zero-downtime VMware ESX host patching capabilities
- Enforces higher levels of compliance to patch standards than physical environments by securely patching offline virtual machines
VMware Distributed Power Management (Experimental)
- Reduces power consumption in the datacenter through intelligent workload balancing
- Automatically powers off servers not currently needed in order to meet service levels, and automatically powers on servers as demand for compute resources increases
Bring Mainframe Class Availability and Reliability to x86 Datacenters
VMware ESXi
- The first and only commercially available hypervisor that does not incorporate or depend on a large “parent partition” or a special purpose virtual machine that runs a full OS image and has privileged access to all other virtual machines.
- Minimizes surface area for potential security attacks, making it the most secure and reliable hypervisor
VMware Storage VMotion
- Enables live migration of virtual machine disks from one datastore to another with no disruption or downtime
- Allows IT administrators to minimize service disruption due to planned storage downtime previously incurred for rebalancing or retiring storage arrays
- Simplifies array migration and or/upgrade tasks, and reduces I/O bottlenecks by moving virtual machines to the best available storage resource in your environment
VMware Site Recovery Manager
- Provides industry-leading capabilities for fully automating the entire disaster recovery process
- Integrates with VMware VirtualCenter and guides users through the process of creating, automating, and testing disaster recovery plans for their virtual infrastructure
- Transforms disaster recovery into a dramatically simpler, faster, and more reliable process that adapts to today’s dynamic datacenters
Run the Most Demanding Applications in a Virtual Environment
VMware ESX Performance Optimizations
VMware ESX 3.5 and VMware ESXi 3.5 contain numerous performance optimizations that enable running the most demanding and intense workloads as virtual machines. These include:
- Support for large memory pages(2MB) for VMware ESX as well as processor assists for memory virtualization
- Support for paravirt-ops standard incorporated in linux kernels 2.6.21
- Support for networking performance optimizations such as TCP Segment Offload and jumbo frames that reduce the overhead associated with processing network i/o.
- Support for NPIV enabling assignment of individual virtual HBAs to each virtual machine and QoS analysis by virtual machine.
VMware ESX Scalability Enhancements
Easy scaling of workloads with
- Support for 64GB of RAM in virtual machines
- Support for physical machines with up to 256GB of RAM.
Expanded Storage and Networking Choices
Expanded storage and networking choices:
- Support for local SATA storage
- Support for 10 GigE
