VMware VirtualCenter

Architecture

VirtualCenter is composed of five main components:

• VirtualCenter Management Server is the central control node for configuring, provisioning and managing virtualized IT environments. The Management Server runs as a service on Microsoft® Windows 2000, Microsoft® Windows XP Professional and Microsoft® Windows Server 2003.
• VirtualCenter Database is used to store persistent information about the physical servers, resource pools and virtual machines managed by the VirtualCenter Management Server. The database resides on standard versions of Oracle, Microsoft® SQL Server, or Microsoft® MSDE.
• Virtual Infrastructure Client allows administrators and users to connect remotely to the VirtualCenter Management Server or individual ESX Servers from any Windows PC.
• VirtualCenter Agent connects VMware ESX with the VirtualCenter Management Server.
• Virtual Infrastructure Web Access allows virtual machine management and access to virtual machine graphical consoles without installing a client.

Performance and Scalability

Large-scale management.  Manage hundreds of servers and thousands of virtual machines. VirtualCenter is designed from the ground up to handle the largest IT environments. With VirtualCenter 2.5, manage up to 200 hosts and 2000 virtual machines with a single VirtualCenter instance.

Management

Virtual machine provisioning and migration.  Provision virtual machines instantaneously and move virtual machines between physical servers.

• Integrated Physical to Virtual machine conversion. Manage multiple simultaneous conversions to virtual machines. Convert physical machines, virtual machine formats such as Microsoft VirtualServer or VirtualPC, backup images of physical machines such as Symantec Backup Exec LiveStateRecovery, Ghost 9 , VMware Consolidated backup images to running virtual machines.
• Guided Consolidation. Guide first time virtualization users, in simpler Windows environments through the consolidation process workflow. Through a wizard based, tutorial like interface, Guided consolidation automatically discovers physical servers, helps analyze their performance and triggers the conversion of physical to virtual machines placed intelligently on the right host.
• Deployment wizard.   Create new virtual machines with a user friendly wizard. Customize network identities and operating system parameters to make new instances unique.
• Re-designed virtual machine templates.  Save virtual machines as templates that can be instantiated in minutes. Minimize errors and downtime by establishing configuration standards for virtual machines. Re-designed templates support easy virtual machine patching and updating. Templates are stored on shared storage for greater reliability.
• Virtual machine cloning.  Copy existing virtual machines when a new instance of a server is needed.
• Cold migration of virtual machines.  Move a powered off virtual machine from one physical server to another by dragging and dropping the virtual machine icon.
• Live migration of virtual machines.  Migrate running virtual machines from one physical server to another with VMware VMotion.
• Live migration of virtual machine disks.  Migrate running virtual machine disks from one storage array to another with VMware Storage VMotion.

Server and virtual machine management

• Virtual Infrastructure Client.  Manage VMware ESX servers, virtual machines, and VirtualCenter Server with a common user interface.
• Virtual Infrastructure Web Access.  Manage virtual machines and access virtual machine graphical consoles without installing a client.
• VMware ESX configuration.   Centralize management and configuration of all VMware ESX servers in VirtualCenter.
• Enhanced inventory model.   Manage the complete inventory of virtual machines, resource pools and physical servers with greater visibility into object relationships. The new inventory model provides the flexibility to organize objects into folders and create two separate hierarchical views.
• Enhanced object model.  Manage virtualized IT environment with a consistent object model covering all entities such as virtual machines, physical servers, and resource pools.
• Interactive topology maps.  Visualize the relationships between physical servers, virtual machines, networks and storage. Topology maps allow to easily verify correct configuration for distributed services such as VMotion, VMware DRS and VMware HA.
• Centralized licensing.  Manage all VMware software licenses with an embedded FlexNet licensing server and a single license file.

System monitoring.  Continuously monitor physical servers and virtual machine availability and utilization from a single interface.

• Alerts and notifications.  Set green, yellow and red level alarms for CPU, memory and heartbeat states to manage and pre-empt problems. Alarm triggers generate automated notifications and alerts. Schedule automatic execution of system management tasks such as sending SNMP traps, sending emails, running management scripts, suspending, powering off, and resetting virtual machines.
• Enhanced performance graphs.  Monitor and analyze virtual machines, resource pools and server utilization and availability with detailed performance graphs. Performance metrics can be defined with several levels of granularity and can be viewed in real time, or across a specified time interval.
• Reports.  Export VirtualCenter data to HTML and Excel formats for integration with other reporting tools and offline analysis.

Integration with third party systems management products through Web services APIs provided by the VMware Infrastructure SDK.

Distributed Resource Optimization

• Resource management  for virtual machines. Allocate processor and memory resources to virtual machines running on the same physical servers. Establish minimum, maximum, and proportional resource shares for CPU, memory, disk and network bandwidth. Modify allocations while virtual machines are running. Enable applications to dynamically acquire more resources to accommodate peak performance.
• Dynamic allocation of resources.   VMware DRS continuously monitors utilization across resource pools and intelligently allocates available resources among virtual machines based on pre-defined rules that reflect business needs and changing priorities. The result is a self-managing, highly optimized and efficient IT environment with built-in load balancing.
• Energy efficient resource optimization. VMware Distributed Power Management (experimental) continuously monitors resource requirements and power consumption across a DRS cluster. When the cluster needs fewer resources, it consolidates workloads and puts hosts in standby mode to reduce power consumption. When resource requirements of workloads increase, DPM brings powered-down hosts back online to ensure service levels are met.

High Availability

• Automatic restart of virtual machines with VMware HA. Provide an easy to use and cost-effective failover solution.

Security

• Fine-grained access control.  Secure the environment with configurable, tiered group definitions and fine-grained permissions.
• Integration with Microsoft® Active Directory.   Base access controls on existing Microsoft® Active Directory authentication mechanisms.
• Custom roles and permissions.  Enhance security and flexibility with user-defined roles. VirtualCenter users with appropriate privileges can create custom roles such as night shift operator or backup administrator. Restrict access to the entire inventory of virtual machines, resource pools and servers by assigning users to these custom roles.
• Audit trails.  Maintain a record of significant configuration changes and the administrator who initiated them. Export reports for event tracking.
• Session management.  Discover and if necessary terminate VirtualCenter user sessions.
• Patch Management. Enforce compliance to patch standards through automated scanning and patching of online VMware ESX hosts and select Microsoft and Linux virtual machines with VMware Update Manager. Reduce security exposure in the environment through secure patching of offline virtual machines and reduce downtime through automatic snapshots prior to patching and rollback. Integration of VMware Update Manager with VMware DRS enables zero downtime VMware ESX host patching.