Datasheet

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING VMWARE VSPHERE 5
Other Members of the vShield Family
vShield Zones is not the only member of the vShield family of products. VMware also offers vShield
App, a guest-level fi rewall that operates at a virtual NIC level and enforces access control policies
even between VMs in the same port group; vShield Edge, which provides network edge security and
gateway services such as DHCP, NAT, site-to-site VPN, and load balancing; and vShield Endpoint,
which enables an introspection-based antivirus solution that third-party antivirus vendors can
leverage for more effi cient antivirus protection. Because these products aren’t part of the VMware
vSphere suite, I don’t discuss them in great detail in this book.
VMWARE VCENTER ORCHESTRATOR
VMware vCenter Orchestrator is a workfl ow automation engine that is automatically installed
with every instance of vCenter Server. Using vCenter Orchestrator, vSphere administrators can
build automated workfl ows for a wide variety of tasks available within vCenter Server. The
automated workfl ows you build using vCenter Orchestrator range from simple to complex.
VMware also makes vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins to extend the functionality to include manip-
ulating Microsoft Active Directory, Cisco’s Unifi ed Computing System (UCS), and VMware
vCloud Director. This makes vCenter Orchestrator a powerful tool to use in building automated
workfl ows in the virtualized data center.
Now that I’ve discussed the specifi c products in the VMware vSphere product suite, I’d like
to take a closer look at some of the signifi cant features.
Examining the Features in VMware vSphere
In this section, I’ll take a closer look at some of the features that are available in the vSphere
product suite. I’ll start with Virtual SMP.
VSPHERE VIRTUAL SYMMETRIC MULTI-PROCESSING
The vSphere Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing (vSMP or Virtual SMP) product allows vir-
tual infrastructure administrators to construct VMs with multiple virtual processors. vSphere
Virtual SMP is not the licensing product that allows ESXi to be installed on servers with multiple
processors; it is the technology that allows the use of multiple processors inside a VM. Figure
1.2 identifi es the differences between multiple processors in the ESXi host system and multiple
virtual processors.
With vSphere Virtual SMP, applications that require and can actually use multiple CPUs can
be run in VMs confi gured with multiple virtual CPUs. This allows organizations to virtualize
even more applications without negatively impacting performance or being unable
to meet service-level agreements (SLAs).
vSphere 5 expands this functionality by also allowing users to specify multiple virtual cores
per virtual CPU. Using this feature, a user could provision a dual “socket” VM with two cores
per “socket” for a total of four virtual cores. This gives users tremendous fl exibility in carving
up CPU processing power among the VMs.
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