Datasheet

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WHY CHOOSE VSPHERE?
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Scenario 1 XYZ Corporation’s IT team has been asked by senior management to rapidly
provision six new servers to support a new business initiative. In the past, this meant order-
ing hardware, waiting on the hardware to arrive, racking and cabling the equipment once
it arrived, installing the operating system and patching it with the latest updates, and then
installing the application. The time frame for all these steps ranged anywhere from a few days
to a few months and was typically a couple of weeks. Now, with VMware vSphere in place,
the IT team can use vCenter Server’s templates functionality to build a VM, install the operat-
ing system, and apply the latest updates, and then rapidly clone—or copy—this VM to create
additional VMs. Now their provisioning time is down to hours, likely even minutes. Chapter 10
discusses this functionality in detail.
Scenario 2 Empowered by the IT team’s ability to quickly respond to the needs of this new
business initiative, XYZ Corporation is moving ahead with deploying updated versions of a
line-of-business application. However, the business leaders are a bit concerned about upgrading
the current version. Using the snapshot functionality present in ESXi and vCenter Server, the IT
team can take a “point-in-time picture” of the VM so that if something goes wrong during the
upgrade, it’s a simple rollback to the snapshot for recovery. Chapter 9 discusses snapshots.
Scenario 3 XYZ Corporation is impressed with the IT team and vSphere’s functionality
and is now interested in expanding their use of virtualization. In order to do so, however, a
hardware upgrade is needed on the servers currently running ESXi. The business is worried
about the downtime that will be necessary to perform the hardware upgrades. The IT team
uses vMotion to move VMs off one host at a time, upgrading each host in turn without incur-
ring any downtime to the company’s end users. Chapter 12 discusses vMotion in more depth.
Scenario 4 After the great success it has had virtualizing its infrastructure with vSphere,
XYZ Corporation now fi nds itself in need of a new, larger shared storage array. vSphere’s
support for Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS gives XYZ room to choose the most cost-effective
storage solution available, and the IT team uses Storage vMotion to migrate the VMs without
any downtime. Chapter 12 discusses Storage vMotion.
These scenarios begin to provide some idea of the benefi ts that organizations see when virtu-
alizing with an enterprise-class virtualization solution like VMware vSphere.
What Do I Virtualize with VMware vSphere?
Virtualization, by its very nature, means that you are going to take multiple operating
systems—such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, or Novell NetWare—and run them on a single
physical server. While VMware vSphere offers broad support for virtualizing a wide range of oper-
ating systems, it would be almost impossible for me to discuss how virtualization impacts all the
different versions of all the different operating systems that vSphere supports.
Because the majority of organizations that adopt vSphere are primarily virtualizing Microsoft
Windows, that operating system will receive the majority of attention when it comes to describ-
ing procedures that must occur within a virtualized operating system. You will also see coverage
of tasks for a virtualized installation of Linux as well, but the majority of the coverage will be for
Microsoft Windows.
If you are primarily virtualizing something other than Microsoft Windows, VMware provides more
in-depth information on all the operating systems it supports and how vSphere interacts with those
operating systems on its website at www.vmware.com.
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