VCenter

Last updated
VMware vCenter Server
Developer(s) VMware, Inc.
Initial releaseDecember 5, 2003;18 years ago (2003-12-05)
Stable release
7.0 Update 3c (build 19234570) [1]
/ January 27, 2022;11 days ago (2022-01-27)
Operating system Windows Server (latest version supported: 6.7U2); VMware ESXi
Platform 32-bit (discontinued in 4.1U2), 64-bit
Website www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-server.html

vCenter Server is the centralized management utility for VMware, and is used to manage virtual machines, multiple ESXi hosts, and all dependent components from a single centralized location.

Contents

VMware vMotion and svMotion require the use of vCenter and ESXi hosts.

vMotion (live migration)

Live migration (vMotion) in ESX allows a virtual machine to move between two different hosts. Live storage migration (Storage vMotion) enables live migration of virtual disks on the fly. [2]

During vMotion Live Migration (vLM) of the (RAM) memory of the VM is sent from the running VM to the new VM (the instance on another host that will become the running VM after the vLM). The content of memory is by its nature changing all the time. ESX uses a system where the content is sent to the other VM and then it will check what data is changed and send that, each time smaller blocks. At the last moment it will very briefly 'freeze' the existing VM, transfer the last changes in the RAM content and then start the new VM. The intended effect of this process is to minimize the time during which the VM is suspended; in a best case this will be the time of the final transfer plus the time required to start the new VM. [3] [4]

svMotion (Storage vMotion)

svMotion enables live migration of virtual disks and their home directories without any downtime. [2] svMotion uses a mirror driver to copy virtual hard drives and/or the home directory from the source to destination datastores simultaneously, which keeps everything in sync until the svMotion operation is complete on the destination, at which point the source data is deleted. [5]

There is a performance impact from running svMotion – read IO from the source and write IO on the destination. This can be verified through esxtop. [6] If VAAI is enabled on the ESXi hosts and on the storage array, it will offload the svMotion migration operation to the array instead of going through the VMkernel, which increases the migration speed.

Related Research Articles

VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture.

Platform virtualization software, specifically emulators and hypervisors, are software packages that emulate the whole physical computer machine, often providing multiple virtual machines on one physical platform. The table below compares basic information about platform virtualization hypervisors.

In computing, thin provisioning involves using virtualization technology to give the appearance of having more physical resources than are actually available. If a system always has enough resource to simultaneously support all of the virtualized resources, then it is not thin provisioned. The term thin provisioning is applied to disk layer in this article, but could refer to an allocation scheme for any resource. For example, real memory in a computer is typically thin-provisioned to running tasks with some form of address translation technology doing the virtualization. Each task acts as if it has real memory allocated. The sum of the allocated virtual memory assigned to tasks typically exceeds the total of real memory.

In computing. Physical-to-Virtual involves the process of decoupling and migrating a physical server's operating system (OS), applications, and data from that physical server to a virtual-machine guest hosted on a virtualized platform.

VMware ESXi Enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor for deploying and serving virtual computers

VMware ESXi is an enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware for deploying and serving virtual computers. As a type-1 hypervisor, ESXi is not a software application that is installed on an operating system (OS); instead, it includes and integrates vital OS components, such as a kernel.

VMware VMFS is VMware, Inc.'s clustered file system used by the company's flagship server virtualization suite, vSphere. It was developed to store virtual machine disk images, including snapshots. Multiple servers can read/write the same filesystem simultaneously while individual virtual machine files are locked. VMFS volumes can be logically "grown" by spanning multiple VMFS volumes together.

VirtualBox Open-source x86 virtualization application

Oracle VM VirtualBox is a type-2 hypervisor for x86 virtualization developed by Oracle Corporation.

Hardware virtualization is the virtualization of computers as complete hardware platforms, certain logical abstractions of their componentry, or only the functionality required to run various operating systems. Virtualization hides the physical characteristics of a computing platform from the users, presenting instead an abstract computing platform. At its origins, the software that controlled virtualization was called a "control program", but the terms "hypervisor" or "virtual machine monitor" became preferred over time.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are online services that provide high-level APIs used to dereference various low-level details of underlying network infrastructure like physical computing resources, location, data partitioning, scaling, security, backup etc. A hypervisor, such as Xen, Oracle VirtualBox, Oracle VM, KVM, VMware ESX/ESXi, or Hyper-V runs the virtual machines as guests. Pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational system can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements.

VMDK is a file format that describes containers for virtual hard disk drives to be used in virtual machines like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox.

In computing, virtualization or virtualisation is the act of creating a virtual version of something, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources.

Eucalyptus is a paid and open-source computer software for building Amazon Web Services (AWS)-compatible private and hybrid cloud computing environments, originally developed by the company Eucalyptus Systems. Eucalyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems. Eucalyptus enables pooling compute, storage, and network resources that can be dynamically scaled up or down as application workloads change. Mårten Mickos was the CEO of Eucalyptus. In September 2014, Eucalyptus was acquired by Hewlett-Packard and then maintained by DXC Technology. After DXC stopped developing the product in late 2017, AppScale Systems forked the code and started supporting Eucalyptus customers.

VMware vSphere VMwares cloud computing virtualization platform

VMware vSphere is VMware's cloud computing virtualization platform.

Live migration refers to the process of moving a running virtual machine or application between different physical machines without disconnecting the client or application. Memory, storage, and network connectivity of the virtual machine are transferred from the original guest machine to the destination.

Universal Storage Platform

Universal Storage Platform (USP) was the brand name for an Hitachi Data Systems line of computer data storage disk arrays circa 2004 to 2010.

Virtual Storage Platform is the brand name for a Hitachi Data Systems line of computer data storage systems for data centers. Model numbers include G200, G400, G600, G800, G1000, G1500 and G5500

VM-aware storage (VAS) is computer data storage designed specifically for managing storage for virtual machines (VMs) within a data center. The goal is to provide storage that is simpler to use with functionality better suited for VMs compared with general-purpose storage. VM-aware storage allows storage to be managed as an integrated part of managing VMs rather than as logical unit numbers (LUNs) or volumes that are separately configured and managed.

Software-defined storage (SDS) is a marketing term for computer data storage software for policy-based provisioning and management of data storage independent of the underlying hardware. Software-defined storage typically includes a form of storage virtualization to separate the storage hardware from the software that manages it. The software enabling a software-defined storage environment may also provide policy management for features such as data deduplication, replication, thin provisioning, snapshots and backup.

Tintri

Tintri, Inc. is a division of DataDirect Networks based in Santa Clara, California. Tintri provides products designed for businesses cloud computing, virtual machines (VMs), and containers. The core product line is the VMstore, a storage system and software designed to simplify management in data center and cloud environments. After becoming a public company in 2017, within a year it ran out of cash and was acquired in bankruptcy.

Dell PowerEdge VRTX is a computer hardware product line from Dell. It is a mini-blade chassis with built-in storage system. The VRTX comes in two models: a 19" rack version that is 5 rack units high or as a stand-alone tower system.

References

  1. "VMware vCenter Server 7.0 Update 2c Release Notes".
  2. 1 2 "The Design and Evolution of Live Storage Migration in VMware ESX" (PDF). Retrieved April 6, 2018.
  3. VMware Blog by Kyle Gleed: vMotion: what's going on under the covers, 25 February 2011, visited: 2 February 2012
  4. VMware website vMotion brochure. Retrieved 3 February 2012
  5. Epping, Duncan (July 14, 2011). "svMotion Mirror Driver". Yellow Bricks. Retrieved April 6, 2018.
  6. Epping, Duncan (9 January 2010). "How to use ESXTOP". Yellow Bricks. Retrieved April 6, 2018.