Aggregation: Transform Isolated Resources into Shared Pools

VMware vSphere aggregates compute resources from farms of physical servers, storage, and network into logical resource pools that maximize efficiency and utilization – this pooling is a critical foundation for building a private cloud. Without this ability to aggregate into logical pools, companies end up with silos of resources even after they have virtualized and performed server consolidation.

Only VMware provides a resource pool model that self-manages and self-optimizes the physical resources while enabling IT to carve out, allocate, and delegate responsibility for logical resources to different constituents according to their resource needs.

• VMware Resource Pools (part of VMware vCenter Server) create shared logical pools of CPU and memory resources within a VMware DRS cluster that guarantee a level of resources for specific groups of users. They can be flexibly added, removed, or reorganized as business needs or organizations change. There is isolation between resource pools so that changes within one resource pool do not impact other unrelated pools. No other offering provides this type of logical resource pooling. Citrix has a capability it calls “resource pools,” but it only does batch configuration changes to a set of VMs—there is no capability to allocate shared resources.
• VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch simplifies and enhances the provisioning, administration and monitoring of virtual machine networking. It provides a centralized point of control for cluster level networking and moves beyond per host network configuration in virtual environments. Neither Microsoft nor Citrix’s current offerings have anything like the vNetwork Distributed Switch. Citrix has announced plans for an open source based distributed switch but no release date has been given, whereas this capability is available today from VMware and third parties have extended its capabilities, like the Cisco Nexus 1000V.
  Watch a technical video on: VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch and VMware vSphere
• VMware vShield Zones monitor and enforce network traffic within your virtual datacenter to meet corporate security policies and ensure regulatory compliance. It enables you to run your applications efficiently within a shared computing resource pool, while still maintaining trust and network segmentation of users and sensitive data. Neither Microsoft nor Citrix’s current offerings have anything like vShield Zones. Any one deploying Microsoft or Citrix’s product would have to create separate clusters of virtualization hosts, with each cluster mapped to a specific network security zone. VMs could not move between clusters without violating the network security zone requirements for the VM.
• VMware vStorage VMFS is a cluster file system that leverages shared storage to allow multiple instances of VMware ESXi/ESX to read and write to the same storage, concurrently. It allows you to greatly simplify virtual machine provisioning and administration by efficiently storing the entire virtual machine state in a central location. Most other offerings do not include a clustered file system in their virtualization offering—you would need to purchase it from a third party.
  Watch a technical video on: VMware vStorage VMFS and Volume Grow and VMware vSphere.

Features	VMware vSphere 4.1 with vCenter	Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V with SCVMM R2	Citrix XenServer 5.6 with Essentials Enterprise
Hierarchical Resource Pools
Isolation Between Resource Pools
Maintain Virtual Network Switch Settings When VMs Live Migrate to Another Host
Manage One Virtual Switch for the Entire Cluster
Maintain Network Security Settings When VMs Live Migrate to Another Host
Enforce Network Security Settings at VM-level, Instead of at Host-level