Features
Ensure System Uptime
Minimize downtime with uniform, cost-effective failover protection against hardware and operating system outages within your virtualized environment with vSphere High Availability (HA). Monitor hosts and virtual machines and automatically restart virtual machines on other hosts in the cluster when an outage is detected. HA provides uniform, automated protection for all applications without modifications to the application or guest operating system.
Live Migration of Workloads
vSphere vMotion allows you to move an entire running virtual machine from one physical server to another, without downtime. The virtual machine retains its network identity and connections, ensuring a seamless migration process. Transfer the virtual machine's active memory and precise execution state over a high-speed network, allowing the virtual machine to switch from running on the source vSphere host to the destination vSphere host. This entire process takes less than two seconds on a gigabit Ethernet network. This capability is possible over virtual Switches, vCenter Servers, and even long distances.
Centralized Network Management
Provision, administer and monitor virtual networking across multiple hosts and clusters from a centralized interface. The vSphere Distributed Switch provides rich monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities, including rollback and recovery for patching and updating the network configuration, templates to enable backup and restore for virtual networking configuration.
Rapid Deployment and Provisioning
Host profiles, which store configuration settings shared by vSphere hosts, can be attached to one or more vSphere hosts or clusters. The host configuration is compared to the host profile and any deviations are reported so configuration drift can be corrected automatically. Administrators can create a profile once and then use it in conjunction with Auto Deploy to rapidly deploy and provision multiple vSphere hosts, eliminating the need for specialized scripts or manual configuration.
Prioritize Resources to Virtual Machines
vSphere Network I/O Control (NIOC) and vSphere Storage I/O Control (SIOC) monitors your network and storage and automatically shifts resources to your high-priority applications according to the rules and policies you’ve set up. It extends the familiar constructs of shares and limits, which exist for CPU and memory, to address network or storage utilization through a dynamic allocation of I/O capacity across a cluster of vSphere hosts. It increases administrator productivity by reducing active performance management.