How Features All Stack Up

vSphere 5 is an amalgamation of storage, security and virtualization controls for cloud deployments. This consists of centralized business continuity, monitoring and management, policy-making, and reporting functions, replacing all those individual applications that many data centers have to cobble together.

According to VMware, the world’s largest provider of virtualization software, three standard Microsoft business software products have the most workloads running in virtual machines in the world. They include SharePoint, with 53 percent of all deployments running in virtual machines; SQL Server, 43 percent; and the Exchange email server, 38 percent.??í Oracle Middleware and Database each have 25 percent of their deployments running in virtual machines, and SAP’s basic system ranks next with 18 percent of the deployments virtualized.

This chart shows the development progress of VMware’s ESX and vSphere packages since the ESX hypervisor went on the market 10 years ago. Note that the first ESX 1 hypervisor could work with only one processor core and 2GB of capacity, while vSphere 5 can work with up to 32 cores and handle 1TB worth of storage.

VMware also came out with a freely downloadable control interface application for the iPad, since so many administrators now are using them on the job. It’s available via the Apple App Store.

VMware added four new components to vSphere 5, which previously consisted of vCenter Operations only.

With the July 12 launch of vSphere 5, VMware’s usual licensing policy, which a number of customers had complained was too complicated and difficult to reconcile at billing time, has changed. No longer will the licensing be tied to physical things like cores and physical RAM per host. Starting immediately, it will be handled strictly on pools of vRAM in operation across the entire system, as this chart shows. (One caveat: VMware will still count processor sockets, however.)

Who would have thought in 2001 that by 2011, a mere 10 years later, about half of the world’s enterprise IT workloads would be tied to virtual rather than physical servers? That’s the reality, according to IT researchers.

VMware realizes that most legacy systems are going to keep on working for months and possibly years to come and that wholesale conversions to virtualized systems aren’t going to happen in many use cases. So it has partnered with a number of integrators shown here, who can ease an enterprise into the new world of virtualization a little at a time.

VMware has brought back a key feature from its now defunct Lab Manager: linked clones. This key capability for driving operational efficiency lets users deploy new VMs from the image library, yet the system will maintain the relationship between the golden image and the deployed VM. This minimizes the storage footprint of the VM, and it uses the link to ensure clones maintain the patch level and integrity of the golden master.

Once the IT or storage administrator has identified the tier of storage for each type of document, it takes only about three clicks to set up an automated “set it and forget it” configuration. This finds the correct storage capacity within the system, places the data into the appropriate tier and adds the right level of security access, according to policy.