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VMware Infrastructure is an infrastructure suite which virtualizes and aggregates physical hardware resources across multiple systems to create and manage pools of resources for virtual datacenters.
VMware has a compliment of distributed services which enable centralized management and control of the virtual environment.
Figure 1: VMware Infrastructure — ©VMware
The current VMware Infrastructure includes the following components (see Figure 1).
VMware ESX Server virtualization layer runs on physical servers and abstracts processor, memory, storage, and networking resources into multiple virtual machines has two service levels: 1) with a service console, and 2) without a service console. The latter service lever further branches into embedabble into the server firmware or an installable version and installable versions.
VirtualCenterServer is the central point for configuring, provisioning, and
managing virtualized IT environments.
VMware Infrastructure Client (VI Client) An interface that allows users to
connect remotely to the VirtualCenter Server or individual ESX Servers from any Windows PC.
VMware Infrastructure Web Access (VI Web Access) is a browser based interface that allows virtual machine management and access to remote consoles.
VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is a high‐performance cluster file system for ESX Server virtual machines.
VMware Virtual Symmetric Multi‐Processing (SMP) is a feature that enables a single virtual machine to use multiple physical processors that operate in parallel.
VMware VMotion™ and VMware Storage VMotion – enables in-situ live migration of virtual machines either 1) between physical servers in the infrastructure eliminating migration related downtime, ensure continuous service availability, and guarantee complete transaction integrity or 2) seamlessly enable the migration of virtual machine files from one datastore to another datastore without interruption of services.
VMware High Availability (HA) facilitates an straightforward, easy to use, and cost‐effective high availability manager for the applications running on the virtual machines to detect affected virtual machines and facilitate replication of the application servers onto other production servers that have spare capacity.
VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) manages the allocations of resources and facilitates maintaining balanced computing capacity dynamically across collections of hardware resources
for virtual machines and adds distributed power management (DPM)
capabilities that enable a datacenter to significantly reduce the overall power consumption.
VMware Consolidated Backup (Consolidated Backup) is an easy‐to‐use, centralized facility for automated backup of all of the virtual machines in the topology. The centralized backup simplifies administration of backups and reduces the overall load on the ESX Servers.
