The Virtual Machine
A virtual computer systems is known as “virtual machine” (VM): a tightly isolated software container with an operating system and application inside. Each self-contained VM is completely independent. Putting multiple VMs on a single computer enables several operating systems and applications to run on just one physical server, or “host”.
A thin layer of software called a hypervisor decouples the virtual machines from the host and dynamically allocates computing resources to each virtual machine as needed.
Following are some of the key features of VMware ESXi:
- Memory compression, over commitment and deduplication.
- built-in high available with NIC teaming and HBA multipathing.
- Intelligent CPU virtualization
- Highly compatible with various servers hardware, storage and OS.
- Advanced security with VMSafe, VMKernel protection and encryption.
- Easy management using vsphere client, vCenter server and command line interface
VMware Virtualization Fundamentals – VMware Server and VMware ESXi
We are starting a new series of articles on VMware that will help you install, configure and maintain VMware environments.
In this first part of the VMware series, let us discuss the fundamental concepts of virtualization and review the VMware virtualization implementation options.
Following are few reasons why you might want to think about virtualization for your environment.
- Run multiple operation systems on one server. For example, instead of having development-server and QA-server, you can run both development and QA on a single server.
- You can have multiple flavours of OS on one server. For example, you can run 2 Linux OS, 1 Windows OS on a single server.
- Multiple OS running on the server shares the hardware resources among them. For example, CPU, RAM, network devices are shared among development-server and QA-server running on the same hardware.
- Allocate hardware resources to different applications based on the utilization. For example, if you have 8GB of RAM on the server, you can assign less RAM to one virtual machine (2GB to development-server) and more RAM (6GB to QA-server) to another virtual machine that is running on that server
- High availability and business continuity. If VMware is implemented properly, you can migrate a virtual machine from one server to another server quickly without any downtime.
- This reduces the operational cost and power consumption. For example, instead of buying and running two servers, you will be using only one server and run both development and QA on it.
On a high level, there are two ways for you to get started on the virtualization using VMware products. Both of these are available for free from VMware.