VI Team Blog

Hi VMware Infrastructure Users and Friends! Welcome to the VMware Infrastructure Team Blog. This blog will be a bi-monthly posting from the VMware datacenter virtualization product team. Here’s where you get to hear about the latest on our products as well as new ideas/concepts from VMware.

Today we begin with an overview of how we think about the entire virtualization stack. The clarification of our viewpoint is necessary because the market tends to speak of two categories – 1. The hypervisor and 2. An amorphous glob called “management”. While it is relatively clear what the hypervisor is, it is far from clear what is being lumped under “management” in the virtualization context.

In our minds, there are two distinct layers of “management” on top of the hypervisor – the virtual infrastructure capabilities, and the automation capabilities.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, and “peel the onion” layer by layer.

The hypervisor:

One question that we get asked all the time is “So, you sell ESX Server, right?” Actually, ESX Server is just one of the components in our suite for virtualizing the datacenter. It installs on each physical server and partitions it in multiple VMs. It’s the best hypervisor on the market, it is rock solid in its reliability and its ability to manage physical system resources amongst many many virtual machines – but that is not all you need for a complete solution.

Virtual Infrastructure Capabilities:

The VMware virtualization platform provides many systems infrastructure services such as high availability, data protection and security that were previously provided in the hardware, OS or applications layers. We provide these services in a consistent, uniform way across the datacenter, independent of the application, OS or hardware, making us a “great standardizer” for the datacenter.

We call this layer of distributed systems infrastructure services provided in the virtualization platform, virtual infrastructure capabilities.

What makes a virtual infrastructure capability different from hypervisor functionality?

If a capability acts on a single physical server, it belongs to the hypervisor. Capabilities that span multiple physical servers are virtual infrastructure capabilities.

VMotion is an example of a virtual infrastructure capability. In the physical world, moving running applications from one physical server to another is practically impossible without downtime. Some sort of workaround is achieved by clustering servers together and failing over to the backup server in order to perform regularly scheduled maintenance activities. But this is complex, expensive and entirely too much trouble to take for a regular workload. In a VMware environment, moving running VMs from one server to another without downtime is a point and click operation!

VMware has range of these capabilities, from zero downtime mobility of workloads with VMotion and Storage VMotion to dynamic load balancing with Distributed Resource Scheduler and automated failover of virtual machines in the case of physical hardware failure with HA. These virtual infrastructure capabilities are what make your virtual datacenter come closer to a real time infrastructure that is resilient to downtime and capable of optimizing and protecting itself.

What we call VMware Infrastructure (VI) is the aggregation of these virtual infrastructure capabilities with our hypervisor. VMware Infrastructure is centrally managed and its capabilities are administered through VirtualCenter, our one-stop shop for virtual infrastructure management

Management & Automation:

We don’t stop at just creating a virtual infrastructure that is more reliable and solid while at the same time flexible, optimized and highly available. Once a datacenter is running this virtual infrastructure, IT management processes become easier to execute.

This is where we draw the line between the virtual infrastructure and the management and automation capabilities:

• VI is about infrastructure services that are turned on at a click of a button, and once configured are executed automatically without much human intervention. For example, if you turn on HA, it will automatically restart VMs without waiting on an admin to do anything.
  
  
• Automation capabilities are about stringing along an entire workflow of multiple steps that that do involve human intervention – for approvals, determining service level agreements etc.

And this is accomplished with our automation products that bring reliability, repeatability, consistency and control to IT processes.

These automation products are quite unique to VMware and they create the end to end control and predictability in virtual infrastructure environments. We’re very excited to have launched two of these recently at VMworld Europe!

So, to recap – here’s what our product portfolio encompasses:

See how our products fit into the above at http://www.vmware.com/products/server_virtualization.html.