Avoid unnecessary risk and overhead by choosing a robust and production-proven hypervisor as the foundation for your virtualized datacenter. Selecting the right hypervisor is the first step towards success in building a virtual infrastructure.
Not all hypervisors are equal. Learn more about how VMware ESX/ESXi is — and will continue to be — the industry’s most robust and production-proven hypervisor and why VMware is the best choice for building a virtual infrastructure.
- Comparing Hypervisors
- Hyper-V and Xen Architectures: Too much code
- Achieve Scalable Performance
- Why File Systems Matter
- An Ecosystem of Virtualization Security Solutions
- Industry Recognition
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Why File Systems Matter
Virtual machines are fully encapsulated in virtual disk files that are either stored locally on the VMware ESX server or centrally managed using shared SAN, NAS or iSCSI storage. Shared storage allows virtual machines to be easily migrated across pools of hosts—and VMware vSphere simplifies use and management of shared storage with the Virtual Machine File System—VMware vStorage VMFS. With VMFS, a resource pool of multiple VMware ESX/ESXi servers can concurrently access the same datastores to boot and run virtual machines, effectively virtualizing your storage resources. The ease of storage management using VMware vStorage VMFS has allowed customers to get more value out of their SAN investments.
Watch a technical video on: VMware vStorage VMFS and Volume Grow, and VMware vSphere
VMware vStorage VMFS gives VMware vSphere a distributed systems orientation that distinguishes it from the competition. VMware DRS and HA features rely on the ability to aggregate the processing, storage and network capacity of multiple hosts into a single pool or cluster upon which virtual machines are provisioned. The VMware vStorage VMFS file system enables this capability. VMware vStorage VMFS allows multiple hosts to share access to the virtual disk files of a virtual machine for VMotion live migrations and rapid restart while managing distributed access to prevent possible corruption. And for times when customers need direct access to capabilities that are specific to their storage array, they can use a raw device mapping (RDM) instead of VMware vStorage VMFS formatted volumes for those virtual machines.
Watch a technical video on: Dynamic Storage Provisioning and VMware vSphere
Our competition lack a true distributed system features. In Microsoft Hyper-V R1, this gap lead to a serious restriction where only one VM could reside on a LUN if a customer wanted VM independent restarts (like VMware HA) or migrations. With Hyper-V R2, Microsoft addresses this one-VM-per-LUN limitation by introducing a brand new technology called Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), a layer built on top of NTFS that only works with Hyper-V. But CSV is not truly a clustered file system, and CSV is a fairly complex architecture that requires a Hyper-V host to act as a coordination node for every shared LUN. If the coordination were to go down, another Hyper-V host would take its place, but that change in roles suffers from a few seconds of downtime, negatively impacting any virtual machines running on that shared LUN. Also, there is currently very little support for CSV from backup vendors. Only one third-party backup product currently supports CSV.
The support for rich storage features across hundreds of storage arrays provided by VMFS contrasts with the approach taken by Citrix. Citrix XenServer lacks a cluster file system and it only exposes rich storage feature such as cloning and snapshots if used with a very limited set of arrays for which specific integrations have been provided. The Citrix StorageLink approach exposes a smaller set of storage features, but only with a select few arrays that support the StorageLink interface.
