The term "virtualization" has recently become very fashionable. The concept of "virtual machine" has ceased to be something exotic and distant. Many organizations, one way or another related to information technology, have already learned how to use virtual machines in their daily activities to improve the efficiency of their IT infrastructure. The concept of virtualization is now used everywhere and, at times, in various contexts: virtualization of storage systems, operating systems, applications. If various aspects of virtualization of hardware resources have been known to specialists for a long time, then virtualization of operating systems has begun to gain momentum only in the last few years, but at a rapid pace.

So what are virtualization and virtual machines for operating systems? The term virtualization itself means the presentation of an object in a convenient form for the user, while all the details of the implementation are hidden, and the object itself has familiar interfaces for interacting with the external environment in relation to it. When they talk about virtualization of operating systems, first of all, they mean the creation of virtual machines - some abstractions that contain their own virtual hardware and software environment that allows you to install and run several instances of operating systems on one physical platform. What is it for? First of all, in order to separate the operating system view from the hardware and place several working virtual servers on one physical one with the ability to quickly migrate and recover operating environments. It also provides maximum flexibility in server deployment, maintenance, and management.

Most CIOs of large organizations, if they do not plan to partially or completely virtualize their IT infrastructure, then at least seriously think about it. In the long term, virtualization projects seem very tempting: increasing the flexibility of the IT infrastructure, increasing the reliability and ensuring high availability of servers, saving on hardware - all these and many other factors attract the heads of IT departments of companies. However, many do not realize the effort it will take to migrate a physical infrastructure to a virtual one, because there are only a few competent specialists in this area, and the acquisition and deployment of powerful commercial virtualization platforms is costly. This article will focus on two popular server virtualization platforms - free VMware Server and commercial VMware ESX Server.

Why VMware?

VMware is one of the earliest players in the newly emerging virtualization platform market. In 1998, VMware patented its virtualization software techniques and has since released many efficient and professional products for virtualization of various levels: from VMware Workstation aimed at the end user (consumer) to VMware ESX Server, designed to host virtual infrastructure for medium and large enterprises. VMware's vast portfolio of products includes many tools to improve the efficiency of the virtualization process, manage virtual servers and migrate from physical platforms to virtual platforms. In Russia, VMware products are especially popular, since virtualization is still gaining momentum in our country, and the platforms of other vendors, not so well known to us, are very "raw" and have much less functionality than their counterparts from VMware. In addition, VMware virtualization almost always outperforms the competition in various performance tests. And if they talk about virtualization of Windows operating systems, then these are almost certainly VMware products. Meanwhile, among virtualization platforms, VMware has a lot to choose from:

• VMware Workstation - a platform focused on Desktop users and intended for use by software developers, as well as IT professionals,
• VMware Player - a free "player" of virtual machines, designed to run ready-made templates of virtual machines that perform a specific task,
• VMware Serverformerly known as VMware GSX Server, aimed at small business infrastructure to support virtual servers
• VMware Ace - a product for creating virtual machines protected by security policies,
• VMware ESX Server - a powerful virtualization platform for medium and large businesses, focused primarily on maintaining a holistic and scalable IT infrastructure,
• VMware Virtual Center is a powerful tool for managing virtualization platforms VMware ESX Server and VMware Server, with extensive capabilities for server consolidation, configuration and management.
• VMware Fusion is a desktop virtualization product for the Mac platform from Apple.

VMware's formal competitors for server virtualization are Microsoft, Virtual Iron, XenSource, and SWsoft. However, the product of SWsoft company has a rather narrow scope of application (hosting), and the development of other vendors in comparison with the products of VMware at the moment look much weaker.

When to implement virtual infrastructure in a company

First of all, it is necessary to clearly define the goals with which virtualization platforms will be implemented. Then, it is necessary to determine the criteria by which the effectiveness of the implementation of the virtual infrastructure will be evaluated. In addition to purely financial criteria (reduced hardware costs, savings in maintenance), you also need to consider improving infrastructure reliability, scalability, flexibility, resilience, reduced deployment time, downtime, disaster recovery, centralized management, and high availability. Of course, all these criteria can be expressed in monetary terms, depending on the type and specifics of the environment to be virtualized.

7 reasons to implement server virtualization

• Increased hardware utilization
  According to statistics, most servers are loaded by 15-20 percent when performing daily tasks. The use of several virtual servers on one physical will increase it up to 80 percent, while providing significant savings in the purchase of hardware.
• Reduced hardware replacement costs
  Since virtual servers are decoupled from specific hardware, updating the fleet of physical servers does not require reinstalling and configuring software. The virtual machine can simply be copied to another server.
• Increasing the flexibility of using virtual servers
  If you need to use multiple servers (for example, for testing and work in production) with varying load, virtual servers are the best solution, since they can be painlessly ported to other platforms when the physical server is experiencing increased loads.
• Ensuring high availability
  Backing up virtual machines and restoring them from backups takes significantly less time and is easier. Also, in the event of equipment failure, the backup copy of the virtual server can be immediately launched on another physical server.
• Improving the manageability of the server infrastructure
  There are many virtual infrastructure management products available to centrally manage virtual servers and provide load balancing and live migration.
• Savings on maintenance personnel
  Simplifying the management of virtual servers in the long term leads to savings on specialists serving the company's infrastructure. If two people using the tools to manage virtual servers can do what four did, why would you need two extra specialists earning at least $ 15,000 a year? Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that a lot of money is also needed to train qualified personnel in the field of virtualization.
• Energy savings
  For small companies, this factor, of course, does not really matter, but for large data centers, where the costs of maintaining a large fleet of servers include the cost of electricity (power, cooling systems), this point is of considerable importance. Concentrating several virtual servers on one physical server will reduce these costs.

When you don't need to implement infrastructure in the company

Despite all the advantages, server virtualization also has some limitations in its use. When planning a virtual infrastructure, consider the following factors:

• Servers have a continuous workload of over 60 percent
  These servers are not good candidates for virtualization because when you migrate it to a virtual machine and host it with other virtual servers, it may run out of resources.
• The server uses additional hardware that cannot be virtualized
  Everything is clear here: in the case when the server uses hardware that is not supported by the vendors of virtualization platforms, there is no point in virtualizing such a server.
• The acquisition and implementation costs of a virtualization platform are too high
  In midsize and small organizations, the server infrastructure is not that large, and the hardware and maintenance costs are low. In this case, you need to be careful about the virtualization procedure, since the purchase of a commercial platform may not be justified.
• Lack of qualified specialists
  In many cases, the process of migrating from physical hardware to virtual machines and further deploying a virtualization platform requires good qualifications from the people conducting them. This is especially required when deploying platforms class "Bare metal" (bare metal). If you are not sure if your people have the knowledge to do this, do not start a virtualization project.

VMware Server is a free and powerful virtualization platform for small businesses

The free product VMware Server is a fairly powerful virtualization platform that can run on servers running Windows and Linux host operating systems. The main purpose of VMware Server is to support small and medium virtual infrastructures of small businesses. Due to the small complexity of its development and installation, VMware Server can be deployed in the shortest possible time, both on the servers of organizations and on computers of home users.

Previously, this product was distributed under a commercial license and was called VMware GSX Server 3, however, with the growth of opportunities and sales of the powerful virtualization platform VMware ESX Server, VMware did not see any prospects in sales of the VMware Server platform, eventually making the product free. It is worth noting that for this product, VMware relies heavily on the revenue from the sales of Virtual Center for VMware Server, an efficient virtual infrastructure management tool based on VMware Server that offers extensive interoperability with virtual machines and virtual server consolidation.

Here are the main use cases for a VMware Server product:

• support of several virtual servers on one physical one in the company's production
• support of multiple virtual servers for testing "in a bundle" in a virtual host network during software development and support
• launching ready-to-use virtual machines (Virtual Appliances) performing a specific server function
• ensuring high availability of virtual servers (virtual machines can be easily transferred between physical servers)
• creation of easy-to-restore backup copies of virtual servers by obtaining snapshots of the current system state ("snapshots").

VMware Server has extensive capabilities for working with virtual machines, including:

• Support for any standard x86 architecture
  VMware Server has no specific requirements for physical server components — unlike VMware ESX Server, which imposes very specific restrictions on server hardware. Multi-core processors are also supported.
• Support for bidirectional virtual SMP (symmetric multi-processing)
  If the architecture of the physical server allows, the virtual machines created in VMware Server can contain two virtual processors, which positively affects the performance of the guest systems.
• Support for a large number of host and guest operating systems, a complete list of which is always available on the VMware website
  The number of host operating systems on which VMware Server can be installed is, of course, less than the number of supported guest systems. Meanwhile, virtually any known operating system can be installed as a guest. Even if it is not in the list of supported, it does not mean that it cannot be installed.
• Support for 64-bit host and guest operating systems
  As host 64-bit systems, 64-bit operating systems of the Windows Server 2003 family can be used, as well as 64-bit versions of Linux systems: Red Hat, SUSE, Mandriva and Ubuntu. The list of supported guest operating systems has also been expanded with 64-bit versions of Windows Vista, Sun Solaris and FreeBSD.
• IntelVT (Intel Virtualization Technology) support
  VMware Server is experimenting with Intel's hardware virtualization technology and can be used to support virtual machines. It should be noted that hardware virtualization, according to research by VMware engineers, is still slower than software virtualization, so it is not recommended to enable software virtualization support for better performance.

An introduction to VMware Server begins with the virtual machine management console window:

In the workspace of the main program window, you can create a virtual machine, add an existing one, switch the console to another physical host (manage the virtual server remotely), and configure host parameters.

Creating a virtual machine in VMware Server is simple and intuitive and takes just a few steps in the New Virtual Machine wizard:

• select the guest system from the list, which will be installed as a guest
• select the name and location of the virtual machine files
• select the type of network interaction between the virtual machine, host OS, other virtual machines and an external network
• enter the volume of the virtual disk and click Finish.

After that, if the distribution of the guest system to be installed is on a CD or DVD, simply insert it into the drive and press the "Power on" button on the toolbar. If you have an operating system distribution kit in the form of an ISO image, select the VM-\u003e Settings menu item, go to the CD-ROM item, where we indicate the path to the ISO image, click OK and Power On.

The process of installing a guest system in VMware Server is quite simple and does not require a separate description. However, when installing guest operating systems, be sure to consider the following points:

• Allocate enough resources to the planned virtual server to perform its functions, but remember that increasing the number of allocated resources is always more difficult than decreasing.
• When choosing the type of virtual server networking, consider security issues, and if the virtual server only needs communication in the host's internal virtual network, do not install Bridged Networking.
• If not only you have access to the virtual server management console, you can make your virtual machine private by checking the box in VM-\u003e Settings-\u003e Options-\u003e Permissions.
• Remember to install VMware Tools on the guests, as installing these add-ons will significantly increase the guest experience and performance.
• Try to maintain the ratio: no more than 4 virtual machines per physical processor, since more of them will significantly affect the performance of virtual servers.

When maintaining a virtual infrastructure based on VMware Server, you must carefully monitor the load on the server's hardware resources. If any virtual machine lacks resources, you need to think about moving it to another server. If you plan to manage a large number of virtual servers, you should consider purchasing VMware Virtual Center, which allows you to centrally control many hosts on which VMware Server is installed, combine them into clusters and monitor the load of hosts by virtual machines. Use the performance counters within the guests to determine the amount of resources to allocate to virtual servers. Try to use only virtual SCSI disks as virtual IDEs are slower.

If you need to access the virtual server console from an external network, you can configure a Web client for VMware Server integrated with Microsoft IIS. This capability will allow you to control virtual servers over the Internet using a secure SSL (Secure Socket Layer) connection.

VMware Server Specifications

Opportunities	VMware Server 1.0
Ability to run as a service	Yes
Starting virtual machines when the host operating system starts	Yes
Local management	Thick client, command line
Multiple user access	Yes
Programming interfaces (API)	Yes (C / COM / Perl)
Remote product use	Yes (Web console)
Remote use of virtual machines	Fat client
Management of multiple installations	Not
Virtual machines / core ratio	2-4
Hardware virtualization support	Intel VT (Experimental)
Generation of virtual hardware	5
Support for virtual processors inside a virtual machine (VMware Virtual SMP technology)	2 (Experimental)
The maximum amount of RAM allocated for a virtual machine	Up to 3.4 GB
The maximum amount of RAM allocated for all virtual machines	Up to 64 GB
IDE virtual controllers / disks per virtual machine	1/4
Virtual SCSI controllers / disks per virtual machine	4/60
Maximum virtual disk size	Up to 950 GB
Maximum number of virtual network interfaces	4
Virtual switches	9
Obtaining snapshots via a fat client	Yes
Getting snapshots via command line	Not
Multiple snapshots	Not
Cloning virtual machines	Not
Virtual Machine Groups (Teams)	Not
Debugging virtual machines	Yes
Shared folders service	Not
Drag & Drop Support Host Virtual Machine	Not
Unsupported host OS	Windows XP Professional (32 / 64bit) Windows XP Home Windows 2000 Professional Red Hat Linux 7.0 Red Hat Linux 7.1

1. Only on operating systems that support extended memory or PAE enabled.
2. Available when using VMware Virtual Center.

There are many different commercial and free utilities available for VMware Server for virtual machine and disk management, performance monitoring, and maintenance. However, if you are going to take full advantage of the power of VMware Server, you should look at VMware Virtual Center for VMware Server.

VMware ESX Server - an enterprise-class virtualization platform and a tool for building a virtual infrastructure of the enterprise

Among the many virtualization solutions offered by VMware, VMware ESX Server stands out. As the company's flagship development, VMware ESX Server is the foundation for building large virtual infrastructures that integrate other VMware products.

VMware ESX Server is a bare metal virtualization platform installed on a bare metal server with no operating system or other software. VMware ESX Server is built on the Linux Red Hat operating system, in which VMware engineers have made significant changes to add many features to support virtualization. This implementation of this platform maximizes the use of server hardware resources and ensures the best interaction between guests and hardware.

VMware ESX Server has many strengths and is the core of a large enterprise virtual infrastructure that requires multiple virtual servers to be maintained, consolidated, highly available, and virtualized between physical servers. ESX Server is the true concept of building an enterprise IT infrastructure using virtual machines.

In addition to the ESX server, the virtual infrastructure of the enterprise also contains components such as storage area networks (SANs), storage systems (Storages), high-speed connections (Fiber Channel) and virtual networks (VLANs). A virtual infrastructure based on VMware ESX Server allows you to centrally manage all these resources and ensure uninterrupted operation of virtual servers. The main components of the virtual infrastructure are:

• ESX Server itself.
• VMware file system VMFS (Virtual Machine File System)optimized for virtual machine performance and high availability.
• VMware SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) - a technology that allows virtual machines to use all processors on a host while having multiple virtual processors.
• Virtual Infrastructure Client is a powerful tool for remote administration and configuration of VMware ESX Server that runs on Windows workstations and has a user-friendly interface.
• Virtual Center - a tool for centralized management of multiple ESX servers.
• Virtual Infrastructure Web Access - the ability to manage virtual machines from an external network via a secure channel.
• VMware VMotion - a technology that allows for "live" migration of a running virtual server to another physical server, without the need to turn off the virtual machine and ensure its smooth operation during migration.
• VMware High Availability (HA) - the ability to automatically restart the necessary mirrors of virtual machines on another server in the event of a hardware or software failure of a physical server.
• VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) - a component that allows dynamic resource allocation to virtual machines.
• VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) - a simple and powerful tool for creating backups of virtual machines.
• VMware Infrastructure SDK - a package for developing applications for virtual infrastructure by third-party developers.

When to use VMware ESX Server-based virtual infrastructure

• You have a clear idea of \u200b\u200bhow many physical servers will be required to support the virtual server infrastructure. Keep in mind that planning the migration of physical servers should be based on no more than 4-6 virtual machines per physical processor with an average real load of the migrated physical servers of 15%.
• You have selected the appropriate VMware ESX Server edition and virtual infrastructure components, calculated the costs of their deployment and maintenance, and concluded that implementation is worthwhile as the savings in hardware and maintenance cover these costs.
• You have specialists who will not only competently conduct a virtualization project, but also administrators who have sufficient knowledge to maintain and develop a virtual infrastructure every day.
• You are ready to purchase the hardware that VMware ESX Server requires. Be careful - the ESX server installation guide tells you what specific hardware is required to install it. At first glance, everything will seem rather expensive, but if you read the requirements carefully, it becomes clear that a fully functioning ESX Server for training purposes can be built for $ 900.

The installation procedure for VMware ESX Server is quite simple and does not require extensive knowledge from the user. If you followed VMware's recommendations and wisely chose the host server hardware, then the ESX server installation will take less than an hour. Once you install at least one ESX, you immediately have a lot of questions and problems - this is the price for the capabilities that VMware ESX Server provides. Here are some basic guidelines for the first steps after installing ESX:

• To manage the ESX server and create the first virtual machines, use the VMware Infrastructure Client, which can be downloaded from https: //.
• To transfer files to and from the ESX, use either WinSCP (slow file transfer, encrypts traffic) or FastSCP (fast file transfer, but it is better not to use it from the external network, since traffic is not encrypted).
• To allow the Root user to log in via SSH (Secure Shell), add the line “PermitRootLogon yes” to the “httpd.conf” file on the ESX.
• Use the "vmkfs-tools" utilities to manage disks, use the "esxtop" command to monitor the performance of virtual machines, and use the "var / log / vmware / hostd.log" log to analyze error reports.
• Remember, the free space on your ESX is always two types of partitions: the first for the operating system of the ESX itself, the second for vmfs partitions for hosting virtual machines. To find out how much free space is left on both partitions, use the "vdf -h" command.

After you install VMware ESX Server, you will need a physical to virtual (P2V) migration tool. VMware offers to use the product VMware Converter for these purposes, but you can use solutions from other manufacturers. You will constantly have questions - do not hesitate to contact the VMware forums, where regular visitors will help you in difficult situations. Ultimately, several virtual machines will be installed on your ESX, which is a virtual infrastructure, which is shown in the figure made using the Veeam Reporter program:

The key concepts for virtual infrastructure are: physical adapter (NIC), virtual adapter (vNIC), virtual switch (vSwitch), and virtual network (Vlan). VMware ESX Server allows you to create up to four virtual network adapters for a virtual machine, each of which can be tied to a virtual network created in turn on virtual switches.

A virtual switch is a kind of abstract multi-port device that switches channels between virtual networks and virtual network adapters of virtual machines.

A virtual network is a combination of several virtual machines into a single network environment in which they interact with each other. If the virtual switch is connected to a physical network adapter, then virtual machines through it will be able to "see" the external, in relation to the ESX, network.

In fact, everything is not as complicated as it seems: the creation of elements of a virtual infrastructure takes very little time and, once configured, such an infrastructure does not require further configuration when new virtual machines are introduced into it.

A little about Virtual Center for VMware ESX Server

As with the VMware Server product, the use of multiple hosts with VMware ESX Server in an enterprise IT infrastructure creates the problem of centralized management and performance monitoring of physical hosts. To solve these problems with VMware ESX Server platforms, as well as with VMware Server, the Virtual Center solution is used. Its appearance is shown in the figure:

Virtual Center allows you to monitor multiple hosts on which VMware ESX Server is installed, cluster and control them using "alarms" - signals about various events. It should be noted that the capabilities of Virtual Center for VMware ESX Server are much greater than those of Virtual Center for VMware Server, which is primarily due to the fact that the VMware ESX Server product itself has much wider capabilities.

Should I choose VMware Server or VMware ESX Server?

From the above, it becomes clear that both products described in the article are aimed at maintaining a virtual server infrastructure and perform similar functions. However, there are significant differences between the two platforms. If a virtual infrastructure based on VMware Server can be built mainly from servers that perform everyday tasks in an organization that do not require high availability, speed and flexibility, then VMware ESX Server is a complete platform for supporting the vital IT infrastructure of an enterprise in conditions of uninterrupted operation of virtual servers and their support in the 24 × 7 × 365 mode.

Here are some examples of when to use a VMware Server-based infrastructure:

• support and maintenance of internal servers of the organization,
• performing testing tasks for individual applications,
• simulation of small virtual networks in order to check working server bundles,
• launching ready-to-use templates of virtual machines that act as internal servers of the organization,
• getting individual servers ready for quick migration.

VMware ESX Server must be used for the following tasks:

• streaming application testing in large software development organizations,
• maintaining external servers of the organization with a high degree of availability, flexibility and manageability,
• modeling of large virtual networks,
• reducing the cost of equipment, maintenance and electricity in large organizations and data centers.

Thus, when implementing virtual infrastructure in an organization, you need to carefully consider the definition of the ultimate goals. When deploying a free VMware Server, there will be no special problems with installation and maintenance, there will also be no costs for purchasing the platform itself, but the organization can lose on performance (since virtualization is performed on top of the host operating system), reliability and availability. Implementation of VMware ESX Server will result in great technical difficulties of deployment and maintenance in the absence of qualified specialists. Plus, investing in such a platform may not pay off for small and medium-sized organizations. However, as the experience of VMware shows, for large organizations, the implementation of VMware ESX Server turns, in the long run, into significant cost savings.

Taking these moments into account will allow you to competently plan the migration of physical servers of your IT infrastructure to virtual ones, while saving not only money, but also time, which, as you know, is also money.

What's New in VMware Cloud Foundation 4?

We recently talked about new platform features and other updates to the VMware product line, announced simultaneously with the flagship product. Recall these articles:

Today we will tell you about another important update - the new version of the set of solutions for hybrid infrastructure VMware Cloud Foundation 4. We wrote about the previous version of this package VCF 3.9.1. As you remember, it is an end-to-end software solution that includes VMware vRealize Suite, VMware vSphere Integrated Containers, VMware Integrated OpenStack, VMware Horizon, NSX, and others running on an online, cloud, or hybrid enterprise infrastructure running SDDC Manager.

The fourth version of VCF includes all the latest components, the articles describing which we have given above:

• vSphere 7
• VMware vSAN 7
• VMware NSX-T
• VMware vRealize Suite 2019
• with Kubernetes support

As we can see, a fundamentally new component has appeared in the VCF stack - VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. We have already written about the infrastructure for supporting containers in the new version of the vSphere platform and. In the new VCF architecture, administrators can deploy and serve applications across Kubernetes clusters using Kubernetes tools and a restful API.

At the same time, vSphere with Kubernetes technology (aka Project Pacific) will provide the following functionality:

• Kubernetes-based vSphere Pod Services will allow nodes to run directly on the ESXi hypervisor. When an administrator deploys containers through the vSphere Pod Service, they receive the same level of security, isolation, and performance guarantees as virtual machines.
• The Registry Service enables developers to store and serve Docker and OCI images on the Harbor platform.
• Network Service enables developers to manage Virtual Routers, Load Balancers, and Firewall Rules components.
• Storage Services enable developers to manage persistent disks for use with containers, Kubernetes clusters, and virtual machines.

All this allows you to get all the advantages of a hybrid infrastructure (VM + containers), which are interestingly described.

For the rest, VCF 4 acquires all the newest features that are provided by the already listed new product releases vSphere, vSAN, NSX-T and others.

Separately, it should be noted that the vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) is very tightly integrated with the vSphere 7.vLCM complements the lifecycle management capabilities of the virtualization infrastructure components that SDDC Manager already has, but at a deeper level - namely, the firmware management level for vSAN nodes ReadyNodes (for example, microcode updates for HBAs).

Like all other updates to the vSphere line, the VCF 4.0 update is expected in April. You can follow the updates on this page.

Tags: VMware, Cloud, VCF, Update, vCloud, Enterprse

Today we're going to talk about Identity Federation Services introduced in VMware vSphere 7.

In today's world, corporate infrastructure is increasingly moving away from legacy password authentication to the practice of two-factor (2FA) or multi-factor (MFA) authentication. The user identification process is always based on 3 key things: you know something (password), you have something (phone), or who you are (fingerprint).

Identity Federation Services allows you to combine your vCenter Server infrastructure with other Identity Providers, such as Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), to unify your two-factor or multi-factor authentication process. In other words, users logging in via 2FA to their desktop or cloud service will use the same procedure for operations with vCenter Server.

Being connected to one of the authentication providers (for example, ADFS), the vSphere Client will redirect to the login form of this provider when logging in. After authorization on the provider side, a reverse redirect will be performed using a secure token, through which the user will already work with vCenter services.

In terms of user experience, this is similar to, for example, logging into a website using Google or Facebook. For information exchange, the OAUTH2 and OIDC protocols are used.

If you enable Identity Federation, you can use traditional Active Directory, Integrated Windows Authentication, and LDAP / LDAPS to authenticate to the vCenter Server. However, it should be understood that all of these authentication methods do not affect vSphere Single Sign-on (SSO), which is still used to make administrative settings to the vSphere platform itself.

Bob Plankers explains this mechanism in more detail in the video below:

Tags: VMware, vSphere, Security, Client, Update

Here's what's new in Ubuntu OVA for Horizon 1.2:

• Supports at least Horizon 7.11 / Horizon Client 5.3 and later
• Supports at least vSphere 6.7 and later
• Updated base image of OVA template on Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS
• Updated virtual hardware - Virtual Hardware v14
• Added the ability to configure a static IP address
• Added support for USB 3.0 and USB Redirection (via linux-agent-installer.sh script)
• Added option to select KDE Desktop environment
• Added option to select Gnome environment (recommended)
• Developer Desktop Package Option
• Choosing a keyboard layout
• Option to enable SSH
• Removed runlevel 5 setting
• Fixed bugs with MOTD
• Automatic software update is disabled
• Improved SSO support
• Improvements to the optimization script, now called optimize.sh

Tags: VMware, Labs, VDI, Horizon, Linux, Update, VMachines

Remember also that you no longer have the vCenter Server for Windows installer. , vSphere 6.7 was the last version of the platform, where there was still a version for vCenter for Windows. This is now only a virtual Photon OS-based vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA).

Earlier we wrote that using the utility that appeared in, you can migrate an external Platform Services Controller (PSC) server to an easy-to-manage embedded PSC using the vCenter Server CLI or the vSphere Client graphical client:

Also, the vCenter 7 installer upgrades vCenter and transfers all services to the Embedded PSC as part of a single task, so the result of the upgrade will be complete immediately. The installer of the new vCenter 7 does not have the option to deploy an external PSC:

2. Migration process

If you go through the migration path from vCenter Server for Windows to vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), then the scheme will be exactly the same - as a result, you will get vCenter 7 to vCSA in the integrated PSC:

After the external PSC is converted, it remains in the console, and decommissioning is a subsequent task for the vSphere administrator. This can be done using the CMSSO-UTIL command or from the client's graphical interface (in the System Configuration section):

3. Ways of upgrade

Everything is simple here. The upgrade is supported according to this plate:

As you can see from the table, the upgrade is supported starting from vSphere 6.5, but many administrators, when upgrading the virtual infrastructure, prefer to redeploy vCenter services so as not to drag along a history of possible bugs that may appear during the upgrade.

Before upgrading, be sure to look at the documents and. But remember that prior to the official release of vSphere 7, these documents do not contain actual information about the seventh version.

Tags: VMware, vCenter, Upgrade

Now it is possible to redefine policies. Computer-based policies are applied at system startup. Using the value RefreshInterval you can control how often these settings are updated before the user logs into the system. And using the value ContinueRefreshAfterLogon you can continue to update the settings after the user is logged in.

Well, the final interesting new feature in DEM 9.11 is Find Items. It will allow you to search in the configuration templates available in the Marketplace, in the Horizon Smart Policy you created, in a certain set of conditions (condition set) and other elements, which is very convenient for administrators:

You can download Dynamic Environment Manager 9.11 from this link. Release Notes are available.

Tags: VMware, DEM, Update, VDI, EUC
Tags: VMware, Horizon, Update, VDI, DEM, Client, EUC

Let's take a look at what's new in vRealize Operations 8.1:

1. Operations with integrated infrastructure vSphere and Kubernetes.

vRealize Operations 8.1 allows you to discover and monitor Kubernetes clusters within a vSphere-integrated infrastructure with the ability to auto-add Supervisor Cluster Objects, Namespaces, Nodes (PODs), and Clusters as soon as you add them to vCenter using Workload Management features.

After that, you will have access to the Summary pages for monitoring performance, capacity, resource utilization, and configuration of Kubernetes on the vSphere 7.0 platform. For example, Capacity forecasting will show infrastructure bottlenecks at the node level, while dashboards, reports, views and alerts will be useful for day-to-day operations.

2. Operations in the VMware Cloud on AWS infrastructure.

Now, in VMware Cloud on AWS, you can use the VMware Cloud Service Portal token to auto-discover SDDC datacenters and set up monitoring tools in a few simple steps. It will also be possible to use one account to manage multiple SDDC objects on the VMware Cloud on AWS platform, including vCenter, vSAN and NSX services, and there will also be full integration with VMConAWS billing.

The following dashboards can be used in the cloud:

• Track resource utilization and virtual machine performance, including NSX Edge, Controller, and vCenter Server services.
• Monitor key resources including CPU, memory, disk and network for all infrastructure and virtual machines.
• Track resource consumption trends and predict metrics such as Time Remaining, Capacity Remaining, and Virtual Machines Remaining.
• Finding virtual machines that consume an unreasonable amount of resources and require reconfiguration based on historical data.

In addition, full support for visualization and monitoring tools will be provided for VMware NSX-T services:

Well, in the vROPs 8.1 release there is a full integration of the cost tracking functionality of VMware Cloud on AWS with the vRealize Operations solution in the portal interface. This will allow you to control already made and deferred costs, as well as detail them by subscription, consumption and payment dates.

The AWS migration assessment has also been updated to save multiple results from different scenarios for further analysis. These scenarios include various options for Reserved CPU, Reserved Memory, Fault Tolerance, Raid Level, and Discounts.

3. Functions of monitoring several clouds (Unified Multicloud monitoring).

Monitoring tools now provide even more advanced features such as Google Cloud Platform support, improved AWS support, and the new Cloud Health Management pack.

VROPS 8.1 now has the following GCP services:

• Compute Engine Instance
• Storage bucket
• Cloud VPN
• Big Query
• Kubernetes Engine

The AWS Management Pack now supports the following AWS Objects:

• Elastic Beanstalk
• Direct Connect Gateway
• Target Group
• Transit Gateway
• Internet Gateway
• Elastic Network Interface (ENI)
• EKS Cluster

The CloudHealth Management Pack has also been enhanced to include the ability to bring GCP Outlook and Pricing data to vRealize Operations 8.1. You can also create any number of custom dashboards by combining prices for different resource ratios of public, hybrid or private clouds.

VRealize Operations 8.1 is expected to be released in April this year, concurrently with the release of VMware vSphere 7. We will write about it for sure.

Tags: VMware, vRealize, Operations, Update, Monitoring, vSphere, Cloud
Tags: VMware, vCenter, VEBA, Labs
Tags: VMware, SRM, Update, DR, Replication, Enterprise

Let's say right away that this is just an announcement, not an announcement of the availability of a new version of the product for download - as a rule, the GA version of vSphere appears within a month after the announcement. Therefore, we will still wait for VMware vSphere 7 in April, and today we will talk about the new capabilities of this platform.

1. Improvements to VMware vCenter services

Here's a simplification of the vCenter Server SSO topology:

• Upgrade vCenter Server for external PSC users to a consolidated topology based on a single vCSA server.
• Embedded PSC is now the only deployment option. External PSC is no longer supported.

VCenter Server Profiles:

• This new feature for vCenter Servers works exactly the same as Host Profiles works for hosts. You can now compare and export the settings of vCenter servers in JSON format for backup purposes, or to apply those settings to another vCenter through the REST API.

VCenter Multi-Homing Features:

• Up to 4 vNICs can now be used for vCSA control traffic, of which one vNIC is reserved for vCHA.

Content Library improvements

• There is now a new view for template management, which provides Check-In and Check-Out functionality for managing template versions and the ability to roll back to a previous version.
• First, a Check-Out is done to open the possibility of making changes, then you can do a Check-In to save the changes in the library.

New vCenter Server Update Planner feature:

• The new capability is available as part of the vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) for vCenter Servers.
• With the Update Scheduler, you can receive alerts for vCenter updates, schedule and roll out upgrades, and perform what-if analysis before upgrading.
• Ability to perform pre-upgrade checks for the selected vCenter server.

2 VMware DRS improvements

• DRS now starts every minute instead of every 5 minutes as it used to.
• The VM DRS score mechanism (aka) is used to generate recommendations.
• Now it is a Workload centric mechanism - this means that now, first of all, the needs of the virtual machine itself and the application in it are taken into account, and only then the use of host resources.
• Memory calculations are based on granted memory instead of the cluster standard deviation.
• The Scaleable Shares mechanism has appeared, which allows you to better allocate Shares in the resource pool in terms of their balancing.

3. Improvements to vMotion

There were such improvements:

• Improvements to migrations for Monster VM (with large resources and very high load), which allows you to increase the chance of a successful migration.
• Using only one vCPU when tracking changed pages (page tracer) instead of all vCPUs, which has less impact on performance during migration.
• Reduced time for context switching to another server (now less than one second). This is achieved by switching at a time when the compacted memory bitmap has already been transferred to the target server, instead of waiting for the full bitmap to be transferred.

4. New features of vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM)

Two improvements can be noted here:

• Cluster Image Management, which includes firmware, driver and ESXi image updates of different versions.
• Initial support for Dell OpenManage and HP OneView solutions.

5. Application Acceleration (Tech Preview) Features

These features came from the acquired company Bitfusion. They allow you to optimize the use of the GPU in the pool over the network, when the vGPU can be partially shared between several VMs. This can be used for AI / ML application task workloads.

All this allows you to organize computations in such a way that ESXi hosts with GPU hardware modules run virtual machines, and their VM companions on regular ESXi servers run applications directly. In this case, CUDA instructions from client VMs are transmitted to server VMs over the network. You can read more about it.

6. Assignable Hardware Functions

This feature allows you to use the so-called Dynamic DirectPath I / O for machines that need to work with PCIe passthrough and Nvidia GRID devices. Now it can be used to select hosts with specific requirements for hardware components, such as vGPU and PCIe. This allows, in turn, to use HA and DRS Initial Placement technologies for such VMs in a cluster where there are ESXi hosts that are compatible in terms of hardware.

7. Certificate Management

Here are the 2 main new features:

• New Certificate Import Wizard.
• Certificate API for scripting certificate management.

8. Identity Federation Features

ADFS features are now supported out of the box, and more IDPs using OAUTH2 and OIDC mechanisms will also be supported.

9. vSphere Trust Authority (vTA) Features

• vTA uses a separate cluster of ESXi hosts to create a separate hardware trust node.
• This cluster will be able to encrypt the compute cluster and its VMs along with vCenter and other management components.
• You can use the attestation mechanism when encryption keys are required.
• It is now easier to enforce the principle of least privilege and expand the audit space.

10. Capability vSGX / Secures Enclaves (Intel)

• Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) allow you to move sensitive application logic and storage to a protected area that guest operating systems and ESXi hypervisor cannot access.
• SGX features eliminate the use of vMotion, snapshots, Fault Tolerance and other technologies. Therefore, SGX is best used only when it cannot be otherwise.

11. New edition of vSphere with Kubernetes (Project Pacific)

We talked about Project Pacific in detail. It is a set of tools for transforming a VMware vSphere environment into a native platform for Kubernetes clusters. vCenter Server provides k8s cluster management capabilities (any clusters older than n-2 will be upgraded). Harbor is also integrated into the solution, which can be included for each namespace.

So far, this is available only for users of VMware Cloud Foundation (4.0), since the solution is tied to a component.

12. Improvements to VMware Tools

Guest Store features are now available in the guest OS (such as updating VMware Tools from the guest OS).

13. Updated hardware (VM Hardware v17)

The main improvements here are:

• Virtual Watchdog Timer - now there is no dependence on physical hardware to restart the VM if the guest OS is not responding.
• Precision Time Protocol (PTP) - For very time sensitive applications (eg trading platforms for traders), you can use PTP instead of NTP and assign it to virtual machines.

14. Improvements to vSphere Client

The following improvements have appeared here:

• Search history has begun to be saved.
• API Explorer now has a better view of all available APIs.
• For Code Capture, you can now choose a scripting language - PowerCLI, Javascript, Python or Go.

Of course, these are not all the new features of VMware vSphere 7, presented the other day. In the near future we will tell you a lot more about them, and in addition, we will also look at the announced solutions of the VMware Tanzu family, VMware Cloud Foundation 4 and vRealize 8.1.

Tags: VMware, vSphere, Update, Enterprise, Kubernetes, vCenter

To translate virtual addresses into physical addresses, a Page Table is used, which contains PTE (Page Table Entries) records:

PTE records store links to real physical addresses and some parameters of the memory page (you can read more about it). PTE record structures can be of different sizes - these are WORD (16 bits / 2 bytes), DWORD (32 bits / 4 bytes), and QWORD (64 bits / 8 bytes). They address large blocks of addresses in physical memory, for example, DWORD addresses a block of addresses of 4 kilobytes (for example, addresses from 4096 to 8191).

Memory is read and transferred to the guest system and applications in 4 KB or 2 MB pages - this allows you to read the contents of memory cells in blocks, which significantly speeds up performance. Naturally, with this approach, there is memory fragmentation - rarely when it is necessary to write an integer number of pages, and part of the memory remains unused. As the page size increases, so does their fragmentation, but performance increases.

Page tables (and there can be several) are controlled by a software or hardware component called Memory Management Unit (MMU). In the case of a hardware MMU, the hypervisor transfers the broadcast control functions to it, and the software MMU is implemented at the VMM level (Virtual Machine Monitor, part of the ESXi hypervisor):

An important component of the MMU is the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB), which is the cache for the MMU. TLB is always located at least in physical memory, and for processors it is often implemented at the level of the CPU itself, so that access to it is as fast as possible. Therefore, the typical TLB access time on a processor is about 10 nanoseconds, while access to physical memory is about 100 nanoseconds. VMware vSphere supports Hardware MMU Offload, that is, transferring memory management functions to the MMU side of the physical processor.

So, if a request appears from the virtual machine to access the virtual address 0x00004105, then this address is split into the address of the virtual page (Virtual page number - 0x0004) and offset (Offset - 0x105 - the area within the page being accessed):

The offset is transmitted directly when accessing the physical page of memory, but the virtual page tag is looked for in the TLB. In this case, the TLB contains an entry that the physical page address corresponding to this tag is 0x0007, accordingly, the translation of the virtual page into the physical one was successful. It is called TLB Hit, that is, hitting the cache.

Another situation is also possible - when decomposing a virtual address, the resulting tag 0x0003 missing in the TLB. In this case, a page is searched in physical memory by tag (page number 3) and its address is already translated ( 0x006). Next, an entry with this tag is added to the TLB (in this case, old entries from the cache are preempted if it is full):

It should be noted that such an operation causes a slightly larger delay (since you have to search in global memory), and this situation is called TLB Miss, that is, a TLB miss.

But this is not a bad situation, since latency still goes to nanoseconds. But the access can be much longer (milliseconds and even seconds) if the page that the guest OS needs has been copied to disk.

Let's look at an example:

Virtual machine accessed virtual address 0x00000460for which there is a tag 0x0000... In physical memory, page 0 is allocated for this tag, which means that you need to look for this page on the disk where the page was flushed due to lack of physical RAM.

In this case, the page is restored from disk to RAM (displacing the oldest page in terms of access time), and then the address to this page is translated. This situation is called page failure ( Page Fault), which leads to delays in application operations, so it is sometimes useful to track Page Faults of individual processes in order to understand the reason for the drop in performance when working with memory.

Tags: VMware, vSphere, ESXi, Memory, Performance, Blogs

Existing vSphere Platinum users after the announced date will receive vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses, VMware AppDefense SaaS product and VMware AppDefense Plugin for vSphere (see where to download this plugin). For vCloud Suite Platinum and Cloud Foundation Platinum users, nothing changes, except for the evolution of vSphere itself, which is included in the packages.

Tags: VMware, vSphere, Platinum, Update, Support

The package focuses on code quality, reusability, unit testing, relationship management, and side-by-side project releases for the vRealize platform. vRealize Build Tools are extensions packaged in a Maven repository format that support the use of an IDE (via Maven) and a CLI for developing, testing, and deploying solutions for vRA / vRO platforms.

Let's see what's new in the second version:

• Support for the solution, its blueprints, custom forms, subscriptions and flavor-mapping mechanics
• Support for existing content and import it for vRO 8
• Support for vRO 8 functions to export workflows to a folder structure based on their tags
• Running worker processes on vRO using maven command
• Ability to save JS Actions IDs at source in order to prevent conflicts in vRO environment
• Improvements to experimental support for TypeScript projects
• Bug fixes and documentation updates

To get started with vRealize Build Tools, you need the following tools:

• vRealize Orchestrator
• Microsoft VS Code

You can download vRealize Build Tools here.

Tags: VMware, Labs, vRealize, Automation, Orchestrator, Update

In addition to many bug fixes, the utility has several new cmdlets:

• Add-vRA-Project-Administrator
• Add-vRA-Project-Member
• Get-vRA-DeploymentFilters
• Get-vRA-DeploymentFilterTypes
• Get-vRA-FabricNetworksFilter
• Get-vRA-FabricImagesFilter
• Remove-vRA-Project-Administrator
• Remove-vRA-Project-Member
• Update-vRA-Project-ZoneConfig

As a reminder, this module is not supported by VMware (like all utilities at VMware Labs that are in Tech Preview status), so use it carefully.

You may find this tool useful in the following cases:

• When you need to compare two clusters in terms of performance (for example, on different hardware)
• When to understand the performance impact of cluster configuration changes
• When to verify that a new cluster is configured correctly before launching it into a production environment

To run Weathervane, you need to create container images, prepare a config file, and run a benchmark. Next, the utility will itself deploy containers in the cluster, launch applications and collect test results.

Weathervane deploys the benchmark application to the nodes and feeds the load there, which is generated through the Workload driver component. This driver can be located both together with the benchmark application, and in the external environment, in a separate cluster.

Weathervane can be set to constant load for a fixed number of simulated users, or it can be configured to search for the maximum number of users so that it meets quality-of-service (QoS) requirements. In the latter case, the test result will be the maximum number of WvUsers that the cluster can handle. Actually, this parameter should be used to compare clusters by performance.

This is what the components of the Weathervane solution look like (the Run harness component is responsible for executing test runs and getting test results):

Weathervane uses a multi-tiered web application that includes stateless and stateful services. You can choose from these types of application deployment. Multiple application instances can be run in a single run, allowing testing to scale across large clusters.

The Weathervane app consists of several tiers. The application logic is implemented through Java services running on the Tomcat server that communicate via the REST API and RabbitMQ messages, and use Zookeeper for coordination. Backend storages are implemented using PostgreSQL and Cassandra. Front-end web servers and proxy cache servers are implemented in Nginx.

Tags: VMware, Kubernetes, Weathvane, Update, Performance

In Russia, too, there are already 10 people with vExpert carriers, not so many, but not too few (at the level of Sweden and Norway). It is clear that the majority of vExpert are from those countries where everything is good with English, since the audience of blogs in English is wider, which motivates authors to write posts (and in general vExpert is given for blogging).

This is what the top ten looks like:

And here are those specialists from Russia who received vExpert this year:

Tags: VMware, vExpert, Blogs

Performance of VMware vCenter Server 6.7 when working with virtual infrastructure of VMware ESXi servers in remote and branch offices

Many users of the VMware vSphere platform know that there is such an option for deploying and operating a distributed virtual infrastructure as ROBO (Remote or Brunch Offices). It implies the presence of one or more main data centers, from where small remote offices are managed, where several VMware ESXi servers are located, with or without their own vCenter.

At the end of last year, VMware released an interesting paper "Performance of VMware vCenter Server 6.7 in Remote Offices and Branch Offices" (we have already covered it a bit), which discusses the main aspect of using such a scenario - performance. After all, remote offices can be located in other cities, countries and even continents, access to which is carried out via different types of connections (for example, 4G or satellite), so it is very important how much traffic various operations consume, and how quickly they work out from the administrator's point of view.

The parameters of various types of network connections in VMware were summarized in a table (in the right column, what was obtained as a result of using the test configuration, and in the left column, as is the case in scenarios with real data centers):

For testing, we used a remote configuration of 128 ESXi hosts, where 3840 virtual machines were registered (960 VMs per cluster, 30 per host), of which up to 3000 machines were turned on simultaneously.

vSAN 6.7 improves HCI operational efficiency, reduces learning curve and accelerates decision making. This release provides more consistent, robust, and secure application support. In addition, the knowledge of leading experts, the latest technologies and analysis tools are used for more convenient and accelerated problem solving. More and more companies and cloud service providers are choosing VMware vSAN for their hyper-converged infrastructure.

OPPORTUNITIES

Product improvements

The following are the major new features and updates for vSAN 6.7.

• HTML5 based user interface
• The completely redesigned user interface provides modern control capabilities. The new interface was built on the same platform that is used in other VMware products, so customers will have a unified and easy-to-use process for managing the most complete SDDC product stack. In addition, the new interface reduces the number of steps required to complete many tasks by streamlining workflows.
• vRealize Operations in vCenter
• VRealize Operations, integrated directly into vCenter, provides complete visibility into HCI environments deployed on-premises or across a wide range of public clouds and is available free of charge to all vSAN Advanced and Enterprise customers. With customizable vSAN dashboards in a single management console, you can monitor and control your HCI environment. Integration of new or existing vROPs instances is seamless.
• vSAN ReadyCare
• VSAN ReadyCare Support underlines VMware's commitment to vSAN customers and provides end-to-end support through leading experts and the latest analysis and technology. Using predictive modeling in vSAN Support Insight, VMware analyzes anonymously collected data from thousands of vSAN customers and notifies them before issues arise. In addition, vSAN Health Validators provide real-time notifications and troubleshooting advice.
• FIPS 140-2 Encryption
• VSAN introduces the first industry standard storage encryption solution for HCI. VSAN 6.7 introduces vSAN Encryption, the first software solution to meet FIPS 140-2 and stringent US federal requirements. vSAN Encryption helps you reduce data protection costs and increase flexibility by eliminating hardware dependency and simplifying core management processes. It is also the first HCI solution to have STIG guidelines approved by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).
• Increased application resiliency
• VSAN provides a consistent end-user experience for applications with intelligent self-recovery capabilities such as adaptive resynchronization, fast failover for physically segregated networks, and replica consolidation. Adaptive sync optimizes I / O traffic management to keep applications healthy during sync. Consolidating replicas reduces the time and effort required to bring a node into maintenance mode. Finally, the need for failover of physically separate networks is eliminated with instant failover.
• Increased availability of distributed clusters
• Distributed cluster environments are even more efficient with intelligently decoupling witness traffic, redefining the underlying environment, and efficient resynchronization. Separating witness traffic and efficient synchronization optimizes the route and size of the data that travels on each link, making failover transparent to application end users. Redefining the core environment increases the availability of workloads by using more efficient logic in the event of an environment failure.
• Next generation optimized apps
• The vSAN solution uses a new retention policy (vSAN host pinning) to bring the efficiency and resiliency of vSAN to meet the needs of the latest shared-nothing applications. With this policy, vSAN maintains one copy of the data and writes blocks of data to the ESXi host running the VM. This capability is especially important for applications with large amounts of data (Hadoop), NoSQL (DataStax), and other applications that perform data backups at the application level.
• Expanded support for mission-critical business application environments
• VSAN now supports more mission critical application environments with support for Windows Server Failover Clustering, which simplifies storage management for these workloads and helps customers accelerate their migration to a centralized SDDC.
• Proactive Support with vSAN Support Insight
• Proactive support improves vSAN reliability with alerts that are generated before infrastructure problems occur, and shortens traditional support time with periodic data collection. To use this feature, you must register for the Customer Experience Improvement Program.
• Adaptive Core Dump support
• Adaptive Core Dump support reduces vSAN customer resolution time for more types of environments by automatically adjusting the direction and size of valuable data used to expedite support.
• Extended hardware support
• vSAN now supports 4Kn disks to help prepare vSAN environments for future evolving needs and enable you to lower your total cost of ownership.

Hypervisors (virtualization technologies) have existed for more than 30 years and during this time they have managed to become one of the main "cogs" in the cloud ecosystem. Many virtualization companies choose two popular hypervisors - VMware and KVM. We propose to figure out which one is better. But first, a little theory.

What is a hypervisor?

A hypervisor is a program that separates the operating system from the hardware. Hypervisors virtualize server resources (processor, memory, disk, network interfaces, etc.), allowing them to be used as their own, and create several separate virtual machines based on one server. Each created virtual machine is isolated from its neighbors so as not to affect the work of others. The hypervisor requires virtualization support: for Intel processors on an Intel VT processor, and for AMD processors on AMD-V.

Hypervisors are divided into two types: the former work directly with the server, and the user's operating system runs on top of the hypervisor. These hypervisors may provide some users with server management functionality, and most enterprises use these hypervisors.

The second type of hypervisor, also known as hosted hypervisor, runs with the operating system installed on the server. And operating systems for new users are built on top of the hypervisor.

Desktop hypervisors such as Oracle VirtualBox or VMware Workstation are type 2 hypervisors, while VMware and KVM are type 1. VMware and KVM are installed directly on the server and do not require the installation of any operating system.

VMware vSphere

Before purchasing VMware vSphere, you can try the trial version (60 days), after which you need to buy a license, or put up with the limitations of the free version.

The free version, called VMware Free vSphere Hypervisor, has no CPU or memory limits for the host, but there are a number of others:

• The product API is read-only;
• a virtual machine cannot have more than 8 cores;
• it cannot be used with Veeam to create backups;
• connection to vCenter Server is not supported;
• high availability, VM Host Live Migration and VM Storage Live Migration technologies are also not supported.

The product from VMware differs from its counterparts in supporting a large number of operating systems - Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Netware, MacOS and others.

Installing a VMware distribution on a server is very simple: just boot from CD, flash drive, or via PXE. In addition, scripts are supported to automate the process of installing software, configuring the network, and connecting to the vCenter Server.

It is also important to have a special VMware vCenter Converter that allows you to use MS Virtual Server, Virtual PC, Hyper-V images in ESXi, as well as physical servers and disk partition images created by such programs as Acronis True Image, Norton Ghost and others.

VMware vSphere has built-in Microsoft Active Directory integration, which means you can authenticate users in a private or hybrid cloud using Microsoft Domain Services. Flexible resource allocation allows for hot add CPU, RAM, and hard disk (including resizing the current hard disk without rebooting).

VMware Fault Tolerate is a VMware technology designed to protect virtual machines with continuous availability clusters. If the host (ESXi server) with the Primary working copy of the virtual machine fails, the protected virtual machine will instantly switch to the "Secondary" or "shadow" copy running on another ESXi server. For machines protected by VMware Fault Tolerance, there is a constant (real-time) copy of the entire state of memory and processor instructions from the main copy to the shadow copy. If the primary ESXi host fails, users won't even notice the failover process to the second host. This is what makes Fault Tolerance different from High Availability. In High Availability, if the physical server fails, the virtual machines will be restarted on other nodes, and while the operating systems are rebooted, users will not be able to access the virtual servers.

In addition to VMware Foult Tolerate, the VMware vCloud Suite Enterprise license provides high availability, resiliency, and disaster recovery with vSphere HA, vMotion, Storage vMotion, and vCenter Site Recovery Manager.

To reduce planned outages in servicing servers or storage systems (DSS), the vMotion and Storage vMotion functions move virtual machines and their disks online without interrupting applications and users. VSphere Replication supports multiple vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) replication options to protect against major disasters. SRM provides centralized disaster recovery planning, automatic Failover and Failback from a backup site or vCloud, and non-disruptive disaster recovery testing.

The peculiarities of this hypervisor include selectivity to the hardware - before installing, you must carefully check the existing hardware for compatibility with the desired version of ESXi. There is a special one for this on the VMware website.

Licensing of VMware products has its own specifics. Additional confusion is added by periodic changes (from version to version of vSphere) in the VMware licensing policy. There are several points to consider before purchasing VMware vSpere licenses:

• the hypervisor is licensed on a per physical basis (CPU). Each server CPU requires a separate vSphere license (cores are not physical processors and do not count towards licensing);
• the available functionality of an ESXi server is determined by the vSphere license installed on it. A detailed guide on licenses is available at;
• for each purchased vShpere license, you must purchase a service support package (at least for a year);
• VMware does not impose limits on the amount of memory (RAM) installed on the server or on the number of running virtual machines.

Another VMware product, Vcenter Server, can be used to manage multiple hosts with ESXi hypervisors, storage systems, and networking equipment. The vSphere client plug-ins provided by VMware partners give IT administrators the ability to manage third-party elements in the data center directly from this console. Therefore, vCenter users can back up, protect data, manage servers, networks and security directly from the vCenter interface. In the same console, you can configure triggers that will notify you of problems that have arisen, and get data about the operation of the entire infrastructure in the form of graphs or tables.

KVM

KVM is an easy-to-use, lightweight, low-resource, and fairly functional hypervisor. It allows you to deploy a virtualization platform and organize virtualization under the Linux operating system in the shortest possible time. During operation, KMV accesses the operating system kernel through a special module (KVM-Intel or KVM-AMD). Initially, KVM only supported x86 processors, but modern versions of KVM support a wide variety of processors and guest operating systems, including Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, etc. By the way, all Wiki resources (MediaWiki, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikidata , Wikiversity) use this particular hypervisor.

Because guest operating systems interact with a hypervisor that is integrated into the Linux kernel, guest operating systems have the ability to access hardware directly without having to modify the guest operating system. Due to this, there is almost no slowdown in the guest operating system.

KVM allows virtual machines to use unmodified QEMU, VMware and other images containing operating systems. Each virtual machine has its own virtual hardware: network cards, disk, video card, and other hardware.

Thanks to support for unmodified VMware images, a physical server can be easily virtualized using the same VMware vServer Converter utility, and then transferred the resulting file to the hypervisor.

Installing KVM on a Linux operating system involves installing the KVM package and the Libvirt virtualization library, and carefully setting up the virtualization environment. Depending on the operating system used on the host, you need to configure a bridge or connection to a VNC console through which virtual machines will communicate with the host.

It is more difficult to administer KVM, since there is no transparent access to files, processes, consoles and network interfaces, this has to be configured on your own. Rebuilding VM parameters in KVM (CPU, RAM, HDD) is not very convenient and requires additional steps, including rebooting the OS.

The project itself does not offer convenient graphical tools for managing virtual machines, only the Virsh utility, which implements all the necessary functions. For convenient management of virtual machines, you can additionally install the Virt-Manager package.

KVM does not have built-in tools like Fault Tolerate for VMware, so the only way to create a HA cluster is to use network replication with DRDB. The DRBD cluster only supports two nodes, and the nodes are synchronized without encryption. That is, for a more secure connection, you must use a VPN connection.

In addition, to build a high availability cluster, you will need the Heartbeat program, which allows the nodes in the cluster to exchange service messages about their status, and Pacemaker, the cluster resource manager.

The KVM hypervisor is distributed as an open source product, and for corporate users there is a commercial solution Red Hat Virtualization (RHEL), based on KVM and the oVirt virtual infrastructure management platform.

The undoubted advantage of this hypervisor is that it can run on any server. The hypervisor is rather unpretentious in terms of resources, which makes it easy to use for testing tasks.

Please note that KVM has no support service. If something doesn't work out, you can count on the forums and community help. Or go to RHEL.

So what should you choose?

Both hypervisors are mature, reliable, high-performance virtualization systems, each with its own characteristics to consider when choosing.

KVM is generally more scalable than VMware, primarily because vSphere has some limitations on the servers it can manage. In addition, VMware has added a large number of storage area networks (SANs) to support multiple vendors. This feature means VMware has more storage options than KVM, but also makes it harder to support VMware storage as it expands.

KVM is generally the most popular hypervisor for companies looking to reduce implementation costs and are less interested in enterprise-grade features.

Research has shown that KVM's TCO is typically 39 percent lower than VMware's, although actual TCO depends on specific factors such as operational parameters and site workload.

Tight integration with the host operating system is one of the most common reasons why developers choose KVM. Especially those using Linux. The inclusion of KVM in many Linux distributions also makes it a convenient choice for developers.

Cloud providers offering IaaS services to their customers typically opt for an infrastructure built on VMware products. Solutions based on VMware Sphere contain all the important corporate functions for ensuring high and continuous availability, provide support for more guest operating systems and have the ability to interface the customer's infrastructure with cloud services.

The issues of creating and using virtual machines have been discussed in our magazine many times - the infrastructure software designed to solve this problem is developing very dynamically today, as well as the demand for a wide variety of solutions in this area. The reason for returning to this topic was the emergence of new versions of a number of products from VMware (a division of EMC), as well as, importantly, the expansion of the range of services related to these products, provided in Russia - this is what this article will discuss.

Virtual machines and their applications

the first part of this article is addressed primarily to those readers who are unfamiliar with the concept of a virtual machine and with the modern technologies available in this area.

A bit of history

The concept of "virtual machine" has been around for several decades. The first virtual machines were created with operating systems running on a mainframe, and were separate workspaces that differed in individual settings and made it possible to personalize the working environments of numerous users who shared the same mainframe to some extent. Although the personalization of the 70s was very different from what we are used to today, it nevertheless created certain conveniences for users, saved their work time, and was generally economically justified.

In the era of personal computers, the problem of personalizing the workspace faded into the background and was forgotten for some time. However, in the late 90s, virtual machine technology actually experienced a rebirth and is now being used quite actively. Recently, virtual machine creation tools are very often used in laboratories and software testing departments, in companies specializing in application development, in research departments of development companies, in training centers, as well as as part of corporate solutions.

How virtual machines work

Modern virtual machines require a virtual machine management tool, which is either a specialized operating system with appropriate capabilities, or a Windows, Linux, or UNIX application installed on a real computer called a host. The virtual machine itself, in most cases, is an image of the file system that is formed during the installation of an OS (in general, different from the one that controls the virtual machine management tool) and is stored as a file or located in a dedicated hard disk partition. Using the tool for managing virtual machines, you can load an image of the operating system of a virtual machine into the allocated address space. Such an operating system is called the guest operation system, as opposed to the original operating system, which is called the host operation system, the host operating system (if one exists). After that, the operating system of the virtual machine will be able to interact with the computer hardware (for example, with a video adapter, sound card, keyboard, mouse, network adapters). In this way, for example, when the Windows XP operating system is running, using the virtual machine management tool, load the Linux operating system into the address space allocated for it and switch between both operating systems without restarting the computer, and in some cases use the clipboard for clipboard data between these operating systems or network interaction between them as if they were two different computers. You can also load more than one virtual machine at the same time - if only there is enough RAM for this (of course, there should be a lot of it - after all, there is another operating system in RAM when the virtual machine is loaded).

Why do we need virtual machines

Where are virtual machines used? Most often, such products are used by developers of software that affects the settings of operating systems, for example, installation applications. Since any test run of the installation application can make changes to the operating system settings (registry, configuration files, environment variables, desktop icons, etc.), it is desirable that these changes be easily reversible. Testing the installation application on a virtual machine instead of a real one, at least, will not break the performance of a real operating system, and a virtual machine can always be restored from a backup. In addition, it is much easier to create a "clean" version of an operating system (that is, without installed applications) for testing installation (as well as other) applications in the form of a virtual machine than in the form of a real computer.

Another common use case for virtual machines is testing applications running on different operating systems (such as Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 in different language versions or editions with different service packs). Such testing is usually carried out in the development of "boxed" products, as well as in projects that assume that the customer has a variety of workstations and servers purchased in different years.

In addition to these cases, we will give several more exotic examples of the use of virtual machines: operation of a product that does not work on the existing platform (for example, a DOS application written many years ago); testing the performance of the operating systems themselves or network services; documenting products intended for a platform other than that used to prepare the documentation; demonstration of products for different platforms and their interaction using one computer (the latter is often done by marketing and software sales managers, as well as project managers for its development); preparation of classrooms for classes by copying virtual machines with configured software to workstations; technical support for multi-platform products.

In recent years, special attention has also been paid to the use of virtual machines in the server parts of scalable corporate solutions. Virtual machines are often used to test server software and its various configurations and simulate multi-server configurations on one server, for hosting legacy applications, for creating solutions with increased requirements for information security, for organizing mobile offices and training centers that do not require physical server delivery, for ensuring uniform load of servers and their redundancy by placing the same set of virtual machines on several physical servers, to reduce the cost of implementing and maintaining corporate information systems by reducing the amount of hardware, installation time and setting up server and client software, to reduce software management costs. Today, virtual machines in their corporate information systems are used by many large financial and telecommunications companies, trade and industrial enterprises, medical and educational institutions. Ready-made hardware and software solutions for using virtualization technologies are also available to developers, system integrators and their customers, such as multiprocessor servers with preinstalled virtual machine management tools.

Having discussed what modern virtual machine technology is and where it is applied, we can go directly to the topic of the article - to consider the products of VMware, one of the leaders in the market for creating virtual machines.

VMware Products

vMware (www.vmware.com) was founded in 1998 and its first product was the 1999 VMware virtual machine management tool (later renamed VMware Workstation) for Windows and Linux platforms. For that time, VMware's approach to organizing computing in multi-platform environments was truly revolutionary - previously, virtual machines were talked about only in relation to mainframes. In 2001, this company released server products VMware ESX Server and VMware VirtualCenter. Two years later, VMotion technology was developed to dynamically move virtual machines with server software between physical servers, allowing you to create highly reliable server solutions using virtual machines - it was thanks to this unique technology that VMware finally confirmed its leading position in the market for virtualization tools, significantly ahead of its nearest competitor, Microsoft Corporation, for the quality, variety and reliability of the products offered.

Today, solutions based on VMware server products are used by major telecommunications companies, financial and government institutions, manufacturing and trade enterprises, educational institutions, including such well-known companies as Google, Lockheed Martin, Merrill Lynch, Subaru and QUALCOMM. For authors of their own solutions based on VMware products, the corresponding APIs and sets of tools and examples (Software Development Kit, SDK) are available.

Below is a brief overview of the current capabilities of VMware products.

Products for developing and testing applications and software configurations

This category of VMware products is primarily intended for application developers, testers, end users, and system administrators serving the above categories. Note that two of the three products in this category - VMware Server and VMware Player - are shipped free of charge.

VMware Workstation

Designed primarily for testing desktop and multi-tier distributed applications and their configurations, VMware Workstation 5.5 supports a wide variety of host and guest operating systems. This product can host several recent operating systems from Microsoft, Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, as well as Sun Solaris (for x86 processors) and FreeBSD. As guest OS VMware Workstation 5.5 can use various, including 64-bit, versions of Windows, Linux, Novell NetWare, DOS, Sun Solaris and FreeBSD. Virtual machines can be located both in a file and on a separate hard disk or in a separate partition.

WMware Workstation supports virtual and real IDE and SCSI disks, floppy disks, CD-ROM drives, host computer DVD-ROMs, LPT, COM, USB ports, and dynamically connected USB devices such as scanners, printers, hard drives and flash cards, plug-in PDAs and cameras. In addition to real drives, WMware Workstation can work with ISO-format disc images, treating them as CD-ROM drives. SCSI devices such as scanners, tape drives, CD-ROM drives, DVD-ROM drives can be supported even if there are no drivers for these devices in the host operating system.

WMware Workstation supports a variety of ways to emulate network interaction, from its absence to integration into a local network in which the host is included, as well as emulation of network interaction with other virtual machines as with separate computers, NAT address translation, virtual DHCP server, networking bridging using wireless connections, a wide range of network protocols, switching between different virtual networks.

VMware Workstation allows you to create “snapshots” of a virtual machine (snapshots), storing information about its state, running applications and their data as a file of the host computer (in this case, you can take several “snapshots” of the same machine), and also supports exchange of data between virtual machines and the host operating system using the clipboard and drag-and-drop operations, synchronization of the time of the guest OS and the host OS, the ability to cancel all changes made by the user in this session. Note also that this product includes memory optimizers and multi-tier application management tools specifically designed to improve the productivity of developers and users running a single workstation.

Among the innovations of the latest version of VMware Workstation, we will highlight support for assigning two virtual processors to a virtual machine (which is useful for testing dual-processor software configurations), tools for converting virtual machines created using Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server, as well as OS images created using Symantec LiveState Recovery, to VMware virtual machines, support for 64-bit Intel and AMD processors, support for wireless adapters, auto-discovery of storage devices and USB devices.

Note that at approximately the same low price in terms of operating system support, the capabilities of VMware Workstation are significantly ahead of its closest competitor Microsoft Virtual PC, which can only use desktop versions of Windows 2000 and Windows XP as a host OS, and mainly DOS as a guest OS , all 32-bit desktop versions of Windows and some versions of the now exotic OS / 2 Warp; there is no talk about 64-bit OS support in Virtual PC either.

VMware Server

VMware Server is a free product announced earlier this year and is recommended by the manufacturer as a replacement for the paid VMware GSX Server product. VMware Server is currently available in beta with a final release expected in the second quarter of this year.

VMware Server runs 32-bit or 64-bit server versions of Windows and Linux running on computers with one or more x86-compatible processors (currently 16 processors supported). The set of operating systems supported by this product is quite impressive - among guest operating systems there is a wide range of Linux and Windows versions, and if necessary, this product can be used to run the latest versions of Novell NetWare (Fig. 1).

This product contains tools for organizing remote administration and monitoring, based on a Web interface and running under Windows or Linux. However, unlike VMware Workstation, this product supports only one “snapshot” of a virtual machine, and its features for optimizing host memory use are far from diverse.

Among the innovations that will be available to VMWare Server users, we note support for virtual symmetric multiprocessing (Virtual SMP) and virtualization technology at the hardware level of Intel Virtualization Technology, as well as support for 64-bit guest operating systems.

Although VMware Server itself is a free product, VMware and its partners (including Russian) provide paid technical support to customers who need it.

Note that the technical capabilities of the free VMware Server product are similar to those of the paid Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Enterprise Edition products and exceed the capabilities of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 Standard Edition (for example, in terms of the number of processors supported on the host computer). At the same time, Microsoft Virtual Server runs only under the control of server versions of Windows (it is intended to use mainly various versions of Windows as guest OS), while VMware Server, in addition to Windows, supports a wide range of other OS (Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Novell NetWare ) as guests and Linux as the host OS.

VMware Player

VMware Player is a free product designed to run virtual machines created with VMware Workstation and VMware Server. You cannot create new virtual machines with it. However, the VMware website has a constantly updated section with configured virtual machines available for download and use, running various operating systems and installed software from different manufacturers.

Unlike VMware Server, VMware Player does not offer paid vendor and partner support.

Products for use as part of enterprise IT infrastructure

VMware ESX Server

VMware ESX Server 2.5 is a virtual machine creation tool that does not require a host operating system (in fact, it acts as an operating system itself) and runs on computers with two or more Intel and AMD 32-bit processors and two or more network adapters ... File storage must be SCSI disks, Fiber Channel-accessible drives, or an onboard RAID controller — in such storage, the product creates its own VMware File System (VMFS). This product can be installed on Blade servers or SAN (Storage Area Network - a dedicated high-performance network designed to transfer data between servers and storage devices and operates independently of the local network).

This product supports emulation of up to 80 virtual processors, and as guest OS - server versions of Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Novell NetWare. For some versions of Windows and Linux, virtual symmetric multiprocessor configurations are supported.

Unlike VMware Server, VMware ESX Server is designed for remote administration. It does not contain tools that run locally on the server itself, apart from the installation and initial configuration tools for the ESX Server itself. Tools for organizing remote administration of ESX Server are based on the Web interface (Fig. 2).

Figure: 2. Tools for remote administration of VMware ESX Server 2.5

There is an add-on for VMware ESX Server called VMware Virtual SMPwhich allows one virtual machine to run on multiple physical processors. The specified addition makes it possible to perform additional scaling of the most resource-intensive applications running on virtual machines, as well as testing multiprocessor configurations of server software.

VMware VirtualCenter

VMware VirtualCenter 1.2 is a tool for managing virtual machines running and containing VMware ESX Server and VMware Server. This product allows you to create a configuration of operating systems, services and applications running on virtual machines, transfer them from one machine to another and quickly deploy servers with a pre-installed operating system and applications, monitor the performance and use of server resources (Fig. 3).

Figure: 3. Monitoring the use of server resources using VMware VirtualCenter

The product also includes a wizard for deploying new virtual servers from templates, which can significantly reduce the time to commission a new server compared to traditional server configuration methods.

To dynamically move virtual machines with server software between physical servers, VMware VirtualCenter includes the VMotion tool. Dynamically moving server software using VMotion does not affect the settings of workstations and occurs unnoticed by end users, which allows you to quickly adjust the server load balance and optimize the use of computing resources.

VMware ACE

VMware ACE (for Assured Computing Environment) is a tool for network administrators to create standard virtual machines and workstation configurations. Its main purpose is to simplify the administration of workstations by creating configurations of the same type and transferring them to workstations.

A feature of this product is a wide range of capabilities related to network security, such as support for "guest" workstations (for example, visitors' laptops), setting rules for accessing virtual machines, data encryption, or the expiration date of a particular configuration (Fig. 4 ).

A significant advantage of this product is the ability to create standard hardware-independent configurations of workstations and transfer them to computers with different hardware, which is very important today for most enterprises.

As a guest OS, VMware ACE supports various versions of DOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Novell NetWare, Sun Solaris, and as a host operating system and VMware ACE Manager, all versions of Windows starting from Windows 2000.

VMware P2V Assistant

VMware P2V Assistant is a tool for creating virtual machines from real-life physical machines running different versions of Windows starting from Windows NT 4.0. This product takes a “snapshot” of the original operating system and turns it into a virtual machine, eliminating the need for administrators to install and configure the latter. Virtual machines created with it can run under VMware ESX Server, VMware Server and VMware Workstation.

A few words about costs

it makes sense to talk about the use of virtualization tools when their use can bring certain benefits to the company. Therefore, below we will name the benefits that will be received by companies that have implemented VMware products.

The use of VMware Workstation in software development companies will help save a lot of money spent on the purchase of additional workstations for software testing and creation of distributions, eliminate the cost of their physical placement, software installation, configuration and maintenance. Considering that the cost of VMware Workstation does not exceed several hundred dollars, the purchase of this product is justified even for very small companies - the license for it will pay off in just a few days of use.

If a company has legacy applications that suit everyone, but are designed for a platform that is no longer supported by the manufacturer, then such a company faces a dilemma: whether to continue using the platform, which carries a potential threat to the security of the entire corporate network due to the termination of the release of its updates, or rewrite existing applications? The first way to solve this problem seems to be risky, the second is usually very expensive. The use of VMware Player and VMware Server in such a case may well turn out to be the very option that is devoid of the disadvantages of the previous two - by operating a dangerous platform (no matter for the server or client part of a legacy application) inside a virtual machine, you can provide both an acceptable level of convenience and a sufficient security level.

If we talk about the use of virtual machines as part of the IT infrastructure of corporate solutions, then in this case there are much more opportunities to reduce the costs of infrastructure and its operation. A product such as VMware ESX Server can make it unnecessary to purchase separate hardware servers for different tasks by creating a more efficient and more cost-effective server fleet that will respond quickly to changing operating conditions and application requirements. By leveraging VMware VirtualCenter and VMotion technology, you can significantly reduce the time required to deploy new servers, as well as their downtime during hardware maintenance, by moving virtual machines to other physical servers. And finally, VMware ACE will enable you to implement the most stringent security rules when using virtual machines, thereby reducing the possible risks of corporate data leakage and penetration into the corporate network from the outside, which means it will help to avoid losses and often irreparable damage to the company's reputation caused by such incidents.

), Softline (www.softline.ru).

In addition, now in our country in the training center "Microinform" (www.microinform.ru) a specialized course in Russian is available "Building a virtual infrastructure using ESX Server and VMware VirtualCenter", designed for both consumers of VMware products (system administrators, users ) and for system integrators who implement solutions using VMware products at their customers.

VMware provides end customers with a license and a one-year warranty that includes service support. Currently, service support can be provided not only by the manufacturer itself, but also by Russian partners.

Conclusion

this article is dedicated to products from VMware, the market leader in creating and maintaining virtual machines for x86-compatible computers. In the past five years, the choice of products for such a purpose has become very extensive - if at the beginning of 2001 it was limited to a single product, in which interest was mainly shown by developers and software testing specialists, today it includes not only tools for running virtual machines on workstations and uniprocessor computers, but also a variety of tools for creating and maintaining server solutions, which in their functionality are close to the means of supporting virtual machines for mainframes, and in some parameters even surpass them. Today, both in the world and in Russia, there are many projects on infrastructure virtualization, and, in our opinion, in the near future there will be an even wider use of such products as part of the infrastructure of large enterprises, as well as in companies specializing in the development and maintenance of software ...

You will find trial versions of VMware products on the magazine's CD-ROM attachment.

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