Archive for 'General VMware'

What is VMware High Availability (HA)?

VMware HA is a technology that helps with maintaining maximum uptime in a production environment by monitoring server status and automatically restarting servers on other hosts if necessary. By using a combination of techniques, the HA process will identify when a VM has become unreachable for any number of reasons and when this happens, the Continue reading →

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What is Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)?

Put simply, VMware DRS is a feature of Virtual Center that allows monitoring and and controlling of ESX host workloads. With the Distributed Resource Scheduler enabled, you can set certain resource requirements for various virtual servers such as the minimum RAM required or maximum CPU allowed to be consumed. In the DRS options, you can Continue reading →

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What is VMotion?

VMotion is VMware’s name for one of the most useful technologies you’ll find as an administrator or consultant. VMotion allows the transitioning of a running virtual machine between different physical hosts without any downtime. By allowing this, admins can claim unheard-of uptime on servers, provide exceptional service to customers, and most importantly of all, reduce Continue reading →

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What is VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)?

VCB is the VMware Consolidated Backup product. It basically automates the process of entering snapshot mode and includes a driver to mount the virtual hard disk files (vmdk files) so you can copy data while a VM is up and running. VCB requires a Windows machine that can see the same LUN as the ESX Continue reading →

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What is Virtual Center?

VMware Virtual Center is a management tool that lets you administer one or more ESX hosts. When you are controlling multiple ESX hosts through VC, you gain access to many advanced features which are the key selling points of virtualization such as High Availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS), and VMotion. Imagine if you have Continue reading →

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What is VMware ESX 3?

VMware ESX 3 is a hypervisor which means that it is a very thin layer of software that sits between the physical hardware and the various virtual machines. The hypervisor is responsible for translating requests such as disk access within a VM into actual disk access on the host regardless of whether the host is Continue reading →

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What is Virtual Infrastructure 3?

Virtual Infrastructure 3, or VI3, is VMware’s suite of tools that you would use to virtualize and manage servers. It consists of ESX3, which is the actual hypervisor, Virtual Center (VC), which is the management tool which connects to ESX, and some other minor tools like VCB which aren’t really a focus as far as Continue reading →

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