VMware was founded in 1998 by the following people:
Diane Greene, President and General Manager (1998–2008) Dr. M endel R osenblum, Chief Scientist (1998–2008) Scott D evine, Principal Engineer (since 1998)
Dr. Edward Wang, Principal Engineer (1998–2009) Edouard Bugnion, Chief Architect (1998–2004)
VMware was acquired by EMC in 2004 for $625 million. At the time of the acquisition, sales figures were about $100 million, and the company had 370 employees. In 2011, sales were nearly $3.7 billion, and by 2012, the company employed more than 9000 people.
Pat Gelsinger is the CEO of VMware as of September, 2012 (formerly it was Paul Maritz, since July 2008).
VM ware Portfolio
VMware’s product portfolio has greatly expanded over the past few years. In its early years, the company concentrated mainly on the hypervisor offering, but it is now highly focused on cloud- computing services, administrative tools, collaborative tools, and applications. This book focuses on vSphere 5’s datacenter virtualization platform, and components that are fundamental for managing the datacenter are covered in detail; others are mentioned for information purposes only. Figure 2.1
Figure 2.1. The VM ware product portfolio.
VMware’s strategy is clearly oriented toward cloud-computing offerings. The cloud offering comprises the elements shown inFigure 2.2.
Figure 2.2. VM ware’s cloud infrastructure elements. VM ware Evolution
The first version of VMware ESX was released in 2001; vSphere 5 is its fifth generation. The evolution and the technological leaps that accompanied each new version are worth reviewing here.
Figure 2.3. The evolutionary product development leading to vSphere 5.
First Generation (1998–2003)
ESX1 is the first hypervisor for x86 platforms to offer local storage. Centralization does not yet exist, and servers are managed one by one. This version is adapted for low-charge machines. The hypervisor is mainly used for testing and developmental environments. There is no direct
competition.
Available version: VMware ESX1.x
Second Generation (2003–2006)
vMotion is the first technology enabling the movement of live virtual machines. Administration is centralized using Virtual Center, and several physical servers can be managed. Virtualization is no longer limited to testing; it is now used for production as well. VMware has more than 20,000 customers worldwide and completely dominates this market. Competition is weak, although interesting open-source solutions exist, such as KVM and Xen. EMC acquires VMware in 2004.
Technological leaps: • vMotion • Virtual Center
Available versions: VMware ESX 2.x, Virtual Center 1.x
Third Generation: Virtual Infrastructure 3 (2006–2009)
clustered under a unified entity to provide high service levels with high availability and load
distribution. Backups are performed by Framework VCB. VMware is an imperative asset in most large corporations worldwide. Competition is put into place with the acquisition of Xen by Citrix (in 2007) for $500 million. Microsoft launches Hyper-V to catch up in this field.
Technological leaps:
• VMware HA (High Availability)
• VMware DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduling) • VCB (VMware Consolidated Backup)
• Storage vMotion (since version 3.5)
Available versions: Virtual Infrastructure 3: VMware ESX 3.x, Virtual Center 2.x
Fourth Generation: vSphere 4 (2009–2011)
vSphere 4 extends storage and network functionalities and provides even more functionalities for availability and security. Even though VMware dominates this market, competition increases from Citrix Xen Server and, in particular, from Microsoft with the launch of Hyper-V R2. The year 2009 is significant—more VMs are in production than physical servers.
Technological leaps:
• VMware FT (Fault Tolerance) • vN etwork Distributed Switch • Various APIs
• Changed Block Tracking • Data Recovery
Available versions: vSphere 4: VMware ESX4/ESXi4, vCenter Server 4
Fifth Generation: vSphere 5 (2011–...)
Today vSphere 5 positions itself as the datacenter’s virtualization platform optimized for cloud computing. Several improvements at the storage level and a solid relationship with the most
important software editors and hardware manufacturers make VMware the solution that best meets the most important requirements to deploy critical applications. The licensing strategy is modified. It is based both on processors and on the memory configured in the VMs. The service console is abandoned for a lighter version of ESXi. Many new products complete the offering, such as vCenter Operations Management Suite, SRM 5, vShield 5, and vCloud Director 1.5.
Technological leaps: • Storage DRS • N ew storage APIs
• VMFS-5 (Virtual Machine File System 5) • vStorage Appliance
• vSphere Replication for SRM 5
Available versions: vSphere 5: VMware ESXi 5, vCenter Server 5
vSphere 5 Licenses
The following sections provide some important licensing information you should be familiar with before you adopt the vSphere 5 solution.
vSphere 5 Versions
The following vSphere editions oriented towardsmall and medium business (SMB) are available:
• vSphere Essentials • vSphere Essentials Plus
vSphere Essentials and vSphere Essentials Plus are designed for small-scale deployments. With these editions, up to three host servers can be managed using two physical processors each and up to a maximum 192 GB vRAM entitlement per host server. A vCenter Server Foundation license is integrated.
upgraded to the more advanced versions of vSphere. Unlike the paid versions, the vSphere
hypervisor cannot be managed by vCenter Server. It is exclusively managed with the vSphere Client through a direct connection to the host.
Note
Certain studies show that only 10% of SMBs have deployed virtualized servers. To simplify the deployment of VMware in SMBs, VMware offers VMware Go, a free web- based service that guides users through the installation and configuration of VMware vSphere. This service allows users to virtualize their servers in a few clicks and is a simple way to approach virtualization.
Three editions are intended for medium and large accounts: • vSphere Standard
• vSphere Enterprise • vSphere Enterprise Plus
Table 2.2 compares the features of these three versions.
Note
The Advanced version available with vSphere 4 is no longer offered. It is replaced by the Enterprise version. Customers who use the Advanced version are automatically upgraded to vSphere 5 Enterprise, as long as their maintenance agreement is up-to-date.
Licensing M odel
As shown inFigure 2.4, VMware vSphere 5 is licensed on a per-processor basis with a vRAM entitlement. Each VMware vSphere 5-processor license comes with a certain amount of vRAM capacity, or memory configured to virtual machines (called pooled vRAM). This amount of memory
represents the total configured memory in the VMs (that are powered on) within a vCenter.
Figure 2.4. Example of a vSphere 5 licensing model.
To further explain the model shown inFigure 2.4, here is an example: One standard vSphere license entitles 32 GB of vRAM per CPU socket within a pool. If there are three dual-processor (two sockets) physical servers, six vSphere Standard licenses are required. These six licenses entitle a total quantity of configured VM (and powered on) memory of 6 * 32 GB = 192 GB in the vRAM pool. If each VM has 2 GB of configured memory, for example, this translates into an entitlement to 96 VMs functioning within the pool. Extending the vRAM capacity is easy: Just add more Standard vSphere licenses to the memory pool.
Note
vRAM calculation is based on average annual use. The theoretical cap (192 GB in this example) can be exceeded over defined periods. If the average is below the cap, this has no bearing. (Alerts are populated in vCenter, but performance is not hindered, and functionality is not blocked.) If the average exceeds the cap, the company must sort out the situation to take advantage of all vSphere capabilities.
Note
If one configured VM memory exceeds the maximum vRAM value (96 GB for Enterprise Plus), a single license is required. For example, one VM with 256 GB of configured memory requires the purchase of only one license.
There is no longer any limitation on the number of cores per CPU as there was in vSphere 4 (limit of 6 or 12 cores per CPU, depending on the license). The host server’s RAM is also no longer limited.
alphanumeric characters. vCenter Server 5.0 Licenses
vCenter Server requires one license per server instance. Three licenses are available:
• VM ware vCenter Server for Essentials: License integrated with vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus.
• VM ware vCenter Server Foundation: For small-scale deployments, up to three ESX host servers (dual processor).
• VM ware vCenter Server Standard: For large-scale deployments with an unlimited number of ESX host servers.
vCenter Server licenses include the following:
• vCenter linked mode (only with vCenter Server Standard) • vCenter Orchestrator (only with vCenter Server Standard) • vCenter Server
• vSphere Client
• VMware vSphere Web Client • VMware vSphere Update Manager • VMware ESXi Dump Collector • VMware Auto Deploy
• VMware vSphere Authentication Proxy • vCenter Host Agent Pre-Upgrade Checker
Figure 2.5 shows the vSphere 5.0 installation screen with the different products and tools available.
Figure 2.5. Installation page for vSphere 5.