Technical information

VMware, Inc. 47
Glossary
R RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks)
A technology using multiple hard disks to improve performance, capacity, or reliability.
Raw Device Mapping (RDM)
The use of a mapping file in a VMFS volume to point to a raw physical device.
RVI (Rapid Virtualization Indexing)
AMD’s implementation of hardware virtual MMU. Also called NPT.
S SAN
See Storage Area Network.
Secure Virtual Machine (SVM)
Another name for AMD’s version of virtualization assist, included in some 64-bit AMD processors. See
AMD Virtualization.
Service Console
The service console boots the systems and runs support, management, and administration applications.
Shadow Page Tables
A set of page tables maintained by ESX that map the guest operating system’s virtual memory pages to
the underlying pages on the physical machine.
Snapshot
A snapshot preserves the virtual machine just as it was when you took that snapshot — including the state
of the data on all the virtual machine's disks and whether the virtual machine was powered on, powered
off, or suspended. VMware Workstation lets you take a snapshot of a virtual machine at any time and
revert to that snapshot at any time.
Socket
A connector that accepts a CPU package. With multi-core CPU packages, this term is no longer
synonymous with the number of cores.
Storage Area Network (SAN)
A storage system connected to a dedicated network designed for storage attachment. SAN systems are
usually block-based, and typically use the SCSI command set over a Fibre Channel network (though other
command sets and network types exist as well). See also Network-Attached Storage.
Symmetric Multiprocessor (SMP)
A multiprocessor architecture in which two or more processors are connected to a single pool of shared
memory. See also Uniprocessor (UP).
Symmetric Multithreading (SMT)
Another name for hyper-threading. See also Hyper-Threading.
T Template
A virtual machine that cannot be deleted or added to a team. Setting a virtual machine as a template
protects any linked clones or snapshots that depend on the template from being disabled inadvertently.
Thick Disk
A virtual disk in which all the space is allocated at the time of creation.
Thin Disk
A virtual disk in which space is allocated as it is used.