5.3

16 vFabric Suite
16 Overview of vFabric Suite 5.3
vFabric Application Director 5.0 (Provisioning)
VMware® vFabric™ Application Director is a cloud-enabled application provisioning solution that accelerates and automates
the configuration and deployment of multi-tier applications. vFabric Application Director is optimized for vFabric components,
but is extensible to other components that may be part of your Spring application. Starting with an intuitive drag-and-drop
workspace, application architects can easily create and save complete deployment blueprints that can be deployed onto any cloud.
These visual deployment topologies give you fine-grained control over installation dependencies and configuration changes, as
well as editable scripts.
Main features of vFabric Application Director:
• True separation between applications and infrastructure, enabling the same blueprint to be reused on multiple virtual and cloud
infrastructures.
• Familiar point-and-click user interface that lets you customize scripts, override configurations directly on the application
blueprint, and execute deployments with the click of a button.
• Direct integration to cloud provider catalog for selecting virtual machine templates as the foundational components to build
and deploy applications.
• A customizable catalog, populated with standard application components and scripts, that organizes application building
blocks for easy reuse. A language-agnostic approach makes it easy to add any type of application infrastructure component to
the catalog, and to deploy and update it.
• Version control for application blueprints that help standardize applications and allow organizations to reuse deployment plans
on multiple clouds.
• Organized workflow and dependencies for creating highly orchestrated deployment execution plans that adapt to any cloud,
application requirement, and IT compliance policy.
• Stored scripts to install, configure, start, and stop applications and application infrastructure components.
For new feature information, see vFabric Application Director Release Notes.
vFabric Postgres 9.2 (Standard Edition)
VMware® vFabric™ Postgres Standard Edition (vFabric Postgres) integrates VMware virtualization technology and is
compatible with Postgres SQL (psql) and the PostgreSQL tools and client drivers. It is ACID- and ANSI-SQL-compliant. You
can create, run, and manage vFabric Postgres databases using the Data Director administration UI, or use vFabric Postgres client
tools to connect to vFabric Postgres databases, load data, run scripts, perform backups, and run applications. (vFabric Suite does
not include Data Director.)
vFabric Postgres databases offer elastic database memory, database-aware high availability, and automated optimal database
configuration. The following list calls out vFabric Postgres enhancements over the standard Postgres database.
Main features of vFabric Postgres (Standard Edition):
• Achieves elastic database memory by participating in memory resource management with the vSphere guest operating system
and vSphere Hypervisor. Responding to memory needs and availability, the vFabric Postgres buffer manager shrinks the
database buffer pool to make memory available, and, when memory is available, accordingly increases the amount of memory
dedicated to the buffer pool.
• Higher default values for many critical settings compared with standard Postgres databases, including the settings for
shared_buffers, checkpoint_segments, and wal_buffers. These defaults give you higher out-of-the-box performance than
standard Postgres and a database that you can tune more easily according to workload. (A slight tradeoff occurs in disk space
and memory usage.)