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NIC Teaming Update: Hyper-V Still Cloudy as Ever

May 26, 2011 in Virtualizationism | 4 comments

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To accommodate the performance and reliability demands of today’s workloads, VMware vSphere provides advanced networking capabilities that form a robust foundation for private cloud computing.

Two different vSwitches are provided in vSphere: Standard and Distributed. Both offer NIC teaming for load balancing and fault tolerance, intuitive VLAN support, and Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) for easy lights out datacenter management. Be sure to check out Jason Boche’s great overview of CDP.

vSphere Distributed Switch — Simple Network Management

The Distributed Switch adds advanced networking features to your virtual infrastructure, such as load-based teaming and private VLANs, and offers centralized port group management — eliminating the need to configure vSwitches and port groups individually on each host. vSphere administrators can also choose to go with a hybrid model, maintaining a Standard vSwitch on each host — typically for management — and leveraging a Distributed Switch for virtual machine traffic.

Here you can see a Distributed Switch that spans four ESX hosts, utilizing two physical NICs per host :

By connecting these physical NICs to multiple trunk ports, virtual machines benefit from network redundancy and load balancing while making it trivial to create port groups for any VLAN required. Configurations are instantly propagated across the cluster, boosting efficiency and minimizing human error. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ESX, Hyper-V, networking, vSphere

Understanding VMware vSphere, ESXi, and Release Cycles

May 24, 2011 in Virtualizationism | 6 comments

Last week during a customer presentation that I delivered, one of the attendees asked a surprising question:

What’s the difference between ESXi and vSphere?

While that’s an easy one for most VCritical readers to answer, there are newcomers that may benefit from a simple overview. If you’re here seeking vSphere understanding, welcome!

VMware vSphere Demystified

VMware vSphere is the industry-leading virtualization platform that consists of two primary products: VMware ESXi and vCenter Server. ESXi is the hypervisor and installs on bare metal hardware. vCenter Server provides centralized management and allows administrators to configure and monitor ESXi hosts, provision virtual machines, storage, networking, and much more. The vSphere Client is a Windows application that acts as a single pane of glass to manage either a standalone ESXi host directly or an entire datacenter though vCenter.

VMware ESX vs. ESXi

VMware ESX was introduced a decade ago and will be discontinued with the upcoming major release. Carrying the torch forward will be ultra-slim VMware ESXi, which has already seen several years of successful production deployments. Both products are bare-metal hypervisors — they install directly onto a server instead of a traditional general purpose operating system — and have the same capabilities, accommodating any licensed feature from Essentials to Enterprise Plus: vMotion, DRS, HA, FT, and more.

The primary difference is that with ESXi the Red Hat Linux service console is gone, leaving just the hypervisor and critical supporting features. By eliminating tons of unnecessary Linux components, ESXi footprint is measured in mere megabytes — not gigabytes like competitors. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: ESXi, Hyper-V, Microsoft, vSphere

vSphere Smokes Competitors in InfoWorld Shoot-Out

April 13, 2011 in Virtualizationism | 12 comments

InfoWorld just published the results of a comprehensive comparison of the four major virtualization platforms. This Virtualization Shoot-Out looked at the latest releases from Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware.

VMware vSphere still trounces the competition. Paul Venezia, who drove this multi-vendor effort, considered many aspects of virtualization technology and concluded:

VMware still has advanced capabilities that the others lack. VMware also offers a level of consistency and polish that the other solutions don’t yet match. The rough edges and quirks in Citrix, Microsoft, and Red Hat aren’t showstoppers, but they demonstrate that these alternatives all have hidden costs to go along with their (potentially) lower price tags.

Here is the scorecard, summarizing the various categories tested: