Datasheet
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EXPLORING VMWARE VSPHERE 5
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VMware vSphere Product or Feature More Information Found in This Chapter
VMware vCenter Orchestrator Chapter 14
vSphere Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing Chapter 9
vSphere vMotion and Storage vMotion Chapter 12
vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler Chapter 12
vSphere Storage DRS Chapter 12
Storage I/O Control and Network I/O Control Chapter 11
Profi le-Driven Storage Chapter 6
vSphere High Availability Chapter 7
vSphere Fault Tolerance Chapter 7
vSphere Storage APIs for Data Protection Chapter 7
VMware Data Recovery Chapter 7
First I look at the actual products that make up the VMware vSphere product suite, and then
I examine the major features. Let’s start with the products in the suite; in particular, let’s start
with VMware ESXi.
Examining the Products in the vSphere Suite
In this section, I’ll describe and review the products found in the vSphere product suite.
VMWARE ESXI
The core of the vSphere product suite is the hypervisor, which is the virtualization layer that
serves as the foundation for the rest of the product line. In vSphere 5, the hypervisor comes in
the form of VMware ESXi.
This is a signifi cant difference from earlier versions of the VMware vSphere product suite. In
earlier versions of VMware vSphere, the hypervisor was available in two forms: VMware ESX
and VMware ESXi. Although both products shared the same core virtualization engine,
supported the same set of virtualization features, leveraged the same licenses, and were
both considered bare-metal installations, there were still notable architectural differences. In
VMware ESX, VMware used a Linux-derived Service Console to provide an interactive envi-
ronment through which users could interact with the hypervisor. The Linux-based Service
Console also included services found in traditional operating systems, such as a fi rewall, Simple
Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agents, and a web server.
Table 1.1: Product and feature cross-references (continued)
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