The key benefits of vSphere at a glance
vSphere from VMware enables data centers to accelerate the transition to Cloud computing, including support for public and hybrid Cloud solutions. In addition, the virtualization solution supports more than3,000 applications from over 2,000 independent software vendors (ISVs), setting a new industry standard at vSphere. Key benefits include:
- High efficiency in workload and automation, without compromising performance
- Maximize uptime and reduce unplanned downtime across the entire Cloud infrastructure while eliminating planned downtime for server and storage maintenance
- Built-in powerful tools simplify IT management of virtual data centers, including virtual machine creation, sharing, provisioning and migration
- Significantly reduce IT capital expenditures and operating costs with applications running on vSphere
- High agility and responsiveness to changes in business requirements
- Gain complete control over all business-critical applications running on vSphere with zero-touch infrastructure that provides built-in availability, performance, and scalability
- Unified, standards-based vSphere platform enables optimal use of existing IT resources and next-generation Services, plus extensibility via open APIs for solutions from VMware partners
- Workload migrations and data center maintenance can be performed on the fly without application downtime
- External storage arrays can also be leveraged to run VMs more efficiently with higher performance
Key components of the vSphere virtualization platform
The vSphere hypervisor architecture provides users with a stable, field-proven virtualization layer that also delivers high performance. This allows multiple virtual machines to share existing hardware resources, with performance at least equal to or exceeding native throughput:
- Virtual Symmetric Multiprocessing integrated in vSphere allows the use of even extremely powerful virtual machines - with up to 128 virtual CPUs.
- With vSphere Virtual Machine File System (VMFS), it is also possible for virtual machines to access shared storage devices like Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc. The technology used in the VMFS component also provides the basis for other VMware vSphere components, such as vSphere Storage vMotion.
- With the vSphere storage APIs, integration with various other solutions from supported vendors is possible, e.g. multipathing, data security as well as disk arrays.
New: Support for containers and Kubernetes with vSphere
With each new version of vSphere, support for containers and Kubernetes also increases: from the nested variant - where containers are available in a virtual machine - to native support, where containers run on the hypervisor and are also managed and orchestrated on it in a similar way to virtual machines via vSphere or vCenter. With the integration of Pivotal Container Services (PKS) in the latest version, vSphere can also be used as a platform for Kubernetes services.
Other new features and optimizations in vSphere
vSphere also impresses with other important features in the areas of computing, storage as well as management:
- Increased scalability by increasing the maximum configuration: support for up to 128 virtual CPUs and 4 TB of virtual RAM by VMs, support for up to 480 CPUs and 12 TB of RAM, 1,024 virtual machines Pro host or up to 64 nodes Pro cluster
- Extended support for most x86-based chipsets as well as drivers, guest operating systems (guest OS) and endpoints
- vShield Endpoint with outsourced anti-virus and anti-malware solutions for VM protection eliminates the need to run virtual machine agents
- Hot Add increases VM capacity by adding CPU and RAM resources on demand without interruption or downtime
- 4-vCPU-vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) for continuous availability of applications in case of hardware failures
- Cross-vCenter vMotion as well as Long-Distance vMotion for cross- live migration of VMs between servers without operational or service interruptions
- Use of Virtual Volumes as a framework for integration and management of SAN and NAS storage
- Storage Policy-Based Management for unified, policy-based administration of storage arrays
- Storage API for Array Integration (VAAI) for array-specific tasks such as thin provisioning
- vSphere Hardening for enhanced security in the deployment and use of VMware products
as well as improved intelligent error notifications with specific recommendations and options for troubleshooting, improved capacity planning tools with what-if scenarios and capacity model submission to the analytics engine, and also streamlined policy management including custom roles for individual types of workloads, applications and clusters.
