What is Virtual Infrastructure 3?
by VCP Help on 14/01/09 at 7:39 pm
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 passing the VCP exam is concerned.
By using both ESX and VC, you gain some significant functionality such as VMotion which lets you move a live, running virtual machine between ESX hosts with no interruption. You can imagine how handy this is when you need to do server maintenance or are having trouble on a particular host. VMotion also allows things like HA (High Availability) where Virtual Center will automatically start and stop virtual machines should an ESX host become disconnected from the network, for example. DRS, or Distributed Resource Scheduling, is another component enabled by Virtual Center and this allows the server administrator to allocate minimum and maximum CPU and RAM resources to a VM, thus ensuring minimum service levels or perhaps controlling a server and its users from consuming an unacceptable amount of resources.
VI3 is the over-arching term for the core VMware enterprise products and what the VMware Certified Professional exam covers.
