Users Guide

28 vFoglight Cartridge for VMware
Cartridge for VMware User Guide
VMware VirtualCenter offers some additional valuable features that customers may
wish to use including the VMware Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) feature for
automating the process of balancing VMware ESX Server utilization and the VMware
High Availability (HA) feature for recovering from Host failure within a Cluster.
Datacenters
A Datacenter is the topmost virtual object within a VirtualCenter Server implementation
and is required before any VMware ESX Server Hosts can be added to a VirtualCenter.
A Datacenter is most commonly used to identify the physical boundaries within which
an ESX Server Host can exist. In most implementations these boundaries constitute a
single physical location that contains a large number of ESX Server Hosts. There is no
hard and fast rule stating that a Datacenter must exist entirely at just one physical
location, but other Datacenter implementations are atypical of most virtual
infrastructures.
Within the boundaries of a Datacenter, objects of the same type cannot have the same
name. For example, it is not possible to configure two ESX Server Hosts with the same
name to reside within the same Datacenter. The same goes for virtual machines,
Clusters, Resource Pools and any other objects that can be created and configured to
reside within a Datacenter. Objects of the same type can have identical names as long as
they are located in different Datacenters.
Datastores
The management of Datastores is carried out at the both the Datacenter and the ESX
Server levels.
Each Datastore is contained within a Datacenter and must be uniquely named within its
containing Datacenter.
A Datastore represents a storage location for virtual machine files. The storage location
can be a local file system path, a Virtual Machine File System Storage (VMFS) volume,
or a Network Attached Storage directory.
ESX Server Hosts can be configured to mount a set of network drives (or Datastores).
For each storage location within a Datacenter there is only one Datastore, so multiple
Hosts may be configured to point to the same Datastore. Whenever an ESX Server Host
accesses a virtual machine or file within a Datacenter it must use the appropriate
Datastore path.
Each Datastore object keeps a record of ESX Server Hosts that have mounted it, and a
Datastore object can be removed only if no Hosts are currently mounting that Datastore.