Mastering VMware vSphere 5.5

Scott Lowe, Nick Marshall

• Publisher: Sybex
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118825037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Virtualisation
• Index: Computer Science

The 2013 edition of the bestselling vSphere book on the market

Virtualization remains the hottest trend in the IT world, and VMware vSphere is the industry's most widely deployed virtualization solution. The demand for IT professionals skilled in virtualization and cloud-related technologies is great and expected to keep growing. This comprehensive Sybex guide covers all the features and capabilities of VMware vSphere, showing administrators step by step how to install, configure, operate, manage, and secure it.

This perfect blend of hands-on instruction, conceptual explanation, and practical application is reinforced with real-world examples. Led by Scott Lowe and Nick Marshall, both VMware vExperts, the author team provides expertise that will prepare IT professionals to excel in using this virtualization technology.

• Virtualization is seen as a "best practice" for high availability and disaster recovery solutions, as well as for applications such as Exchange Server and SharePoint
• IDC estimates that there are as many as 7 million jobs available worldwide in virtualization and cloud technology
• Provides hands-on instruction in all the latest features and capabilities of VMware vSphere, with both conceptual explanations and practical applications
• Author team is lead by Scott Lowe and Nick Marshall, well-known VMware experts and popular bloggers

Mastering VMware vSphere provides what every virtualization professional needs to know.

Chapter 1
Introducing VMware vSphere 5.5

Now in its fifth generation, VMware vSphere 5.5 builds on previous generations of VMware's enterprise-grade virtualization products. vSphere 5.5 extends fine-grained resource allocation controls to more types of resources, enabling VMware administrators to have even greater control over how resources are allocated to and used by virtual workloads. With dynamic resource controls, high availability, unprecedented fault-tolerance features, distributed resource management, and backup tools included as part of the suite, IT administrators have all the tools they need to run an enterprise environment ranging from a few servers to thousands of servers.

In this chapter, you will learn to

• Identify the role of each product in the vSphere product suite
• Recognize the interaction and dependencies between the products in the vSphere suite
• Understand how vSphere differs from other virtualization products

Exploring VMware vSphere 5.5

The VMware vSphere product suite is a comprehensive collection of products and features that together provide a full array of enterprise virtualization functionality. The vSphere product suite includes the following products and features:

• VMware ESXi
• VMware vCenter Server
• vSphere Update Manager
• VMware vSphere Client and vSphere Web Client
• VMware vCenter Orchestrator
• vSphere Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing
• vSphere vMotion and Storage vMotion
• vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
• vSphere Storage DRS
• Storage I/O Control and Network I/O Control
• Profile-driven storage
• vSphere High Availability (HA)
• vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT)
• vSphere Storage APIs for Data Protection and VMware Data Protection
• Virtual SAN (VSAN)
• vSphere Replication
• Flash Read Cache

Rather than waiting to introduce these products and features in their own chapters, we will introduce each product or feature in the following sections. This will allow us to explain how each one affects the design, installation, and configuration of your virtual infrastructure. After we cover the features and products in the vSphere suite, you'll have a better grasp of how each of them fits into the design and the big picture of virtualization.

Certain products outside the vSphere product suite extend the vSphere product line with new functionality. These additional products include VMware Horizon View, VMware vCloud Director, VMware vCloud Automation Center, and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, just to name a few. VMware even offers bundles of vSphere and these other products in the vCloud Suite to make it easier for users to purchase and consume the products in their environments. However, because of the size and scope of these products, they are not covered in this book.

As of the writing of this book, VMware vSphere 5.5 is the latest release of the VMware vSphere product family. This book covers functionality found in version 5.5. Where possible, we've tried to note differences between vSphere 5.0 or 5.1 and vSphere 5.5. For detailed information on VMware vSphere 5.0, refer to Mastering VMware vSphere 5, also published by Sybex (2011). (If you are still running vSphere 4.x, Sybex also offers Mastering VMware vSphere 4 [2009].)

To help simplify navigation and to help you find information on the breadth of products and features in the vSphere product suite, we've prepared Table 1.1, which contains cross-references to where you can find more information about a particular product or feature elsewhere in the book.

Table 1.1 Product and feature cross-references

VMware vSphere Product or Feature	More Information Found in This Chapter
VMware ESXi	Installation – Chapter 2 Networking – Chapter 5 Storage – Chapter 6
VMware vCenter Server	Installation – Chapter 3 Networking – Chapter 5 Storage – Chapter 6 Security – Chapter 8
vSphere Update Manager	Chapter 4
vSphere Client and vSphere Web Client	Installation – Chapter 2 (vSphere Client) Installation – Chapter 3 (Web Client) Usage – Chapter 3
VMware vCenter Orchestrator	Chapter 14
vSphere Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing	Chapter 9
vSphere vMotion and Storage vMotion	Chapter 12
vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler	Chapter 12
vSphere Storage DRS	Chapter 12
Storage I/O Control and Network I/O Control	Chapter 11
Profile-driven storage	Chapter 6
vSphere High Availability	Chapter 7
vSphere Fault Tolerance	Chapter 7
vSphere Storage APIs for Data Protection	Chapter 7
VMware Data Protection	Chapter 7
VSAN	Chapter 6
vSphere Replication	Chapter 7
Flash Read Cache	Installation – Chapter 6 Usage – Chapter 11

First we'll look at the actual products that make up the VMware vSphere product suite, and then we'll examine the major features. Let's start with the products in the suite; in particular, let's start with VMware ESXi.

Examining the Products in the vSphere Suite

In the following sections, we'll describe and review the products found in the vSphere product suite.

VMware ESXi

The core of the vSphere product suite is the hypervisor, which is the virtualization layer that serves as the foundation for the rest of the product line. In vSphere 5 and later, including vSphere 5.5, the hypervisor comes in the form of VMware ESXi.

Long-time users of VMware vSphere may recognize this as a shift in the way VMware provides the hypervisor. Prior to vSphere 5, the hypervisor was available in two forms: VMware ESX and VMware ESXi. Although both products shared the same core virtualization engine, supported the same set of virtualization features, leveraged the same licenses, and were considered bare-metal installation hypervisors (also referred to as Type 1 hypervisors; see the sidebar titled “Type 1 and Type 2 Hypervisors”), there were still notable architectural differences. In VMware ESX, VMware used a Linux-derived Service Console to provide an interactive environment through which users could interact with the hypervisor. The Linux-based Service Console also included services found in traditional operating systems, such as a firewall, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agents, and a web server.

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Type 1 and Type 2 Hypervisors

Hypervisors are generally grouped into two classes: Type 1 hypervisors and Type 2 hypervisors. Type 1 hypervisors run directly on the system hardware and thus are often referred to as bare-metal hypervisors. Type 2 hypervisors require a host operating system, and the host operating system provides I/O device support and memory management. VMware ESXi is a Type 1 bare-metal hypervisor. (In earlier versions of vSphere, VMware ESX was also considered a Type 1 bare-metal hypervisor.) Other Type 1 bare-metal hypervisors include KVM (part of the open-source Linux kernel), Microsoft Hyper-V, and products based on the open-source Xen hypervisor like Citrix XenServer and Oracle VM.

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VMware ESXi, on the other hand, is the next generation of the VMware virtualization foundation. Unlike VMware ESX, ESXi installs and runs without the Linux-based Service Console. This gives ESXi an ultralight footprint of approximately 70 MB. Despite the lack of the Service Console, ESXi provides all the same virtualization features that VMware ESX supported in earlier versions. Of course, ESXi 5.5 has been enhanced from earlier versions to support even more functionality, as you'll see in this chapter and in future chapters.

The key reason that VMware ESXi is able to support the same extensive set of virtualization functionality as VMware ESX without the Service Console is that the core of the virtualization functionality wasn't (and still isn't) found in the Service Console. It's the VMkernel that is the foundation of the virtualization process. It's the VMkernel that manages the virtual machines' (VMs') access to the underlying physical hardware by providing CPU scheduling, memory management, and virtual switch data processing. Figure 1.1 shows the structure of VMware ESXi.

Figure 1.1 The VMkernel is the foundation of the virtualization functionality found in VMware ESXi

We mentioned earlier that VMware ESXi 5.5 is enhanced over earlier releases. One such are...