VMWare announce Virtual Infrastructure 3
On June 5th, VMWare announced a suite of products under the label Virtual Infrastructure 3.
The components of the suites are the following :
- VMWare ESX Server : ESX is the virtualization layer installing on top of the Bare Metal. It seems that ESX is able now to run VMs created by Microsoft Virtual Server, or Virtual PC, or also Symantec LiveState Recovery images.
- VMWare VMFS : VMFS, the Virtual Machine File System is an extension of the ESX Server allowing multiple VMs to read and write from the same file storage location. This file system allow adaptive block sizing and automated LUN discovery and mapping.
- VMWare Virtual SMP : The virtual Symmetrical Multi Processor is an extension of ESX Server allowing a single VM to use up to 4 physical processors (within the same physical machine). The scheduler within Virtual SMP allow over commitment of the processors as well as reuse of idle processors between VMs.
- VirtualCenter: This is the centralized management server enabling features like VMotion, VMWare HA, VMWare DRS, VMWare clustering, resource pools, ... which are really targeting enterprise class deployments.
- VMWare Virtual HA: Virtual High Availability is a simple failover solution using a heartbeat to detect hardware failures. Virtual HA will restart an identical VM on another machine. However, there is no mention of checkpointing of the VMs to ensure minimal state loss. This feature is integrated with VMWare DRS to enable intelligent VM placement.
- VMWare DRS: The Distributed Resource Scheduler allow the definition of advanced resource allocation policies for distributed applications. DRS enforce these policies at initial placement time by selecting the best server for a given workload, or continuously, to optimize the resources allocated by eventually moving the VMs through VMotion.
- VMWare VMotion: allow the migration of VMs across all types of physical servers supported by ESX, including across Fiber Channel SAN, NAS, or iSCSI SAN storage devices.
- VMWare Consolidated Backup : It allows the backup of virtual machines from a central location. This is a set of scripts allowing that enable LAN-free backup from a centralized Microsoft Windows 2003 proxy server.
VMWare has segmented the market in 3 categories targeted by a specific offerings :
- Small Business or Branch Office with VMware Infrastructure Starter. It includes ESX starter and VirtualCenter management agent. It retails for $1000 for each couple of processors (physical processors, not cores).
- Enterprise class infrastructure with VMware Infrastructure Standard. It adds clustered VMFS and virtual SMP. It retails for $3750 for every couple of processors.
- Enterprise class Dynamic Datacenters with VMware Infrastructure Enterprise. It adds VMotion, DRS, HA and consolidated backup. The reatil price for this version is $5750 per couple of processors.
The following products are still available separately : VirtualCenter, VMotion, VMWare HA, VMWare DRS and Consolidated Backup.
If we try to map the resulting offering on the functional breakdown I previously described here, we get the following result :
The rational for the coverage is :
- Resource provisioning is partial since VMWare doesn't seem to provide a solution to do the initial provisioning of VMs : You can use PXE to boot from the network, but you will have to manage the OS installation either through Microsoft RIS, or Kickstart.
- Resource Discovery is also partial since VMWare doesn't seem to provide a solution to discover bare metal servers by directly talking to the baseboard. Installing ESX Server from the CDROM or SAN would require a third party management solution.
- Performance management is partial since the whole OS instance is monitored, and any metric available at the middleware or service layer would not be visible to DRS, VMotion of other VMWare products.
- Availability management is partial also as only availability from the OS down to the hardware would be considered, and failure of the application or service would not generate the restart or migration of the VM (not that this would actually be able to fix the problem)
- Workload management is partial since the VMWare solution is not taking into account the scheduling of transactions or workload items to make decision, but seems to only observe OS and hardware resources consumption. It's not clear for example, how VMWare DRS would integrate with a load balancer or other middleware managed schedulers (like Oracle RAC).
Updated on 06/14/2006 to remove the Orchestration support since there is no modeling of worklows in VMWare.
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