Up until now, the cost of managing and maintaining storage was deemed unavoidable and worth it to ensure high availability, shared access across hosts, low latencies, etc. These features will still probably be required for large, complex companies (and for core data center functions, etc.) for years to come, but in many other cases, they may not be required.
Read moreCelebrating its tenth year, VMworld was a busy event this year—as it has been every year for the past nine.
Read moreI have only talked about the Hardware versions in ESX/ESXi product line. There are other products from VMware that have their own support issues such as the VMware Workstation and the Fusion product lines for hosted solutions. You have to really know what version of hosted product you have. For example, VMware workstation 6.0x supports […]
Read moreThe VMware component that allocates CPU, Memory, and Input/Output is called Hypervisor. The installation of ESXi software right on top of the physical server (Dell Server in our case) is called bare-metal hypervisor architecture. So, an x86-based system running the virtualization layer directly is the bare metal hypervisor. This bare metal hypervisor option is common […]
Read moreIn every VMware class I teach, whether it’s the basic ICM (Install Configure, Manage) or it’s the more involved FastTrack, a lot of students run into basic confusion on planning or the lingo. Consequently, I decided to cover these topics in this series of posts.
Background on Physical Machines
The terminology seems to be the first cause for confusion. Remember, before we went to virtualization, we used to buy expensive servers from IBM, HP, Dell or other hardware vendors and then install our operating systems (Oss). The operating system was either something from Microsoft or some flavor of Linux. Then on top of that OS, we installed our application, for example, installing Windows 2008 on top of your Dell Server and then putting something like Microsoft Exchange or SQL on top of that.
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