VMWare vSphere
A new version of VMWare Infrastructure is now available, well it is technically VMWare Infrastructure 4.0 but now rebadged as vSphere 4.0. The main feature they are trumpeting is the cloud operating system. Essentially, this cloud will manage all your applications and resources centrally and to then distribute the functionality to other clouds via on-demand methods.
Of course, you still have your vMotion and Hypervisor features, which we know and love. The new addition I am mostly interested in is vNetwork, using standard and distributed switches. This new technology appears in vSphere, developed in conjunction with Cisco. From this collaboration, you can now have proper virtual Cisco switched in your environment. With full IOS capabilities, or shall we say virtual IOS. This is pretty cool in my book.
If you are new to virtualisation, then let me tell you this. As a company, you would be foolhardy to dismiss the idea of virtualising your I.T infrastructure. Not only do you save rack space, but also you can potentially reduce your carbon footprint by 40% or more. Overall, the level of cost-saving is too great to ignore. Of course, not every physical box can be P2V (physical to virtual) but almost all can be. This week, I completed my virtualisation project at work. I now have a fully functional Exchange cluster that is also running Veritas Volume Manager. These two factors alone caused me much headache over several months. This was mainly because the physical clustering ran on an EMC SAN using fibre channel connections, and trying to mimic that using thick disks in ESX AND for Volume Manager to recognise said disks was not an easy task to perform. Not to mention the numerous cluster problems with Exchange, I have a nice collection of knowledgebase articles on my desk.
In the end, I decided to build it from scratch within ESX. It took much longer than anticipated, but it is fully functional and barring the physical hardware differences, it is a 100% replica of the physical boxes in the server room. The cluster was the last hurdle in the entire environment, a heavy burden finally lifted. Yes as you can tell, I am extremely relieved that it is now accomplished and I can have my life back.
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email Tags: ESX, virtualisation, VMWare, vSphere