Datacenter-Class Virtual Infrastructure for Mission-Critical Environments

What Is VMware ESX Server?
VMware ESX Server is virtual infrastructure software for partitioning, consolidating and managing systems in mission-critical environments. ESX Server and VMware Virtual Infrastructure Nodes provide a highly scalable virtual machine platform with advanced resource management capabilities, which can be managed by VMware VirtualCenter.

How Is VMware ESX Server Used in the Enterprise?
Ideally suited for enterprise datacenters, ESX Server minimizes the total cost of ownership (TCO) of computing infrastructure by increasing resource utilization, minimizing maintenance downtime and maximizing server manageability.

VMware ESX Server allows enterprises to:

• Implement server consolidation. ESX Server consolidates branch office and datacenter mission-critical applications and infrastructure services such as Exchange, SQL Server, Notes and Oracle, running on diverse operating systems onto fewer highly scalable, reliable enterprise-class servers, including blade servers.
• Respond faster with virtual infrastructure. VMware Virtual Infrastructure Nodes (comprising ESX Server, VMware Virtual SMP, VMotion and a VirtualCenter Agent) can be deployed and managed with VMware VirtualCenter to transform your IT infrastructure into virtual infrastructure. Virtual infrastructure allows IT organizations respond faster to business demands with instant provisioning of virtual machines and dynamic resource allocation to those virtual machines as business needs change.
• Dramatically improve and lower the cost of Disaster Recovery capability. Deploying ESX Server and VirtualCenter creates a unified disaster recovery (DR) platform that allows many production servers to be recovered on a single DR server, eliminating the need for costly 1-to-1 mapping of production and DR servers. The hardware independence of virtual machine frees customers from the need to maintain identical hardware at their production and DR sites.

How Does VMware ESX Server Work?
ESX Server transforms physical systems into a pool of logical computing resources. Operating systems and applications are isolated in multiple virtual machines that reside on a single physical server. System resources are dynamically allocated to virtual machines based on need and administrator set guarantees, providing mainframe-class capacity utilization and control of server resources.

ESX Server uses a unique bare-metal architecture that inserts a small and highly robust virtualization layer between the x86 server hardware and the virtual machines. This approach gives ESX Server complete control over the server resources allocated to each virtual machine and it avoids the performance overhead, availability concerns and costs of server virtualization architectures built on a host operating system. VMware has evolved ESX Server since its introduction three years ago to support powerful features such as Virtual SMP and VMotion hot migrations, greatly extending its lead over generic virtualization technologies.

ESX Server simplifies server infrastructure by partitioning and isolating server resources in secure and portable virtual machines. ESX Server enables these server resources to be remotely managed and automatically provisioned. Advanced resource management controls allow IT administrators to guarantee service levels across the enterprise. ESX Server runs directly on the system hardware to provide a secure, uniform platform for deploying, managing, and remotely controlling multiple virtual machines.

With VMware virtual infrastructure built on ESX Server you can:

• Instantly deploy new virtual machines to any server as the business demands using hardware independent templates
• Streamline data center operations and reduce hardware requirements with server consolidation ratios commonly exceeding eight virtual machines per physical processor
• Perform zero-downtime maintenance on live systems without interrupting service
• Load balance workloads across a farm of servers using VMotion to respond to spikes in load and to safely increase farm wide utilization, maximizing return on hardware investment
• Guarantee service levels to applications and dynamically change the service level guarantees
• Automate all activities using the VMware Virtual Infrastructure SDK
• Manage ESX Servers and their virtual machines remotely from any location using the management applications you already own or tools from VMware.

Key Features

• Datacenter-class dynamic logical partitioning for server consolidation
• Unique bare-metal architecture puts a compact and highly secure virtualization layer directly on the hardware for optimum performance levels, reliability and high scalability
• Virtual machine I/O passes directly through to host devices for performance exceeding hosted virtualization technologies that insert an intervening Windows or Linux host operating system
• VMware Virtual SMP supports enterprise workloads in multi-processor virtual machines
• Resource controls for virtual machine CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network I/O usage support service level guarantees
• Advanced memory management features permit overcommitment of memory resources for cost-effective scalability
• Supports large host systems (up to 64GB of host memory, 256TB of storage, 16 host processors, and 80 powered-on virtual machines) for scalability, extensibility, and robustness
• Supported on most common x86 server and blade systems
• Encapsulates virtual machines in easily managed hardware-independent container files
• Provides revolutionary VMotion technology for zero downtime migration when managed by VMware VirtualCenter
• Built-in support for NIC Teaming, SAN multipathing and VLANs provides datacenter-level availability
• Available as part of the VMware ESX Server Virtual Infrastructure Node which bundles the most popular VMware platform components - ESX Server, VMotion, Virtual SMP, and the VirtualCenter Agent - in a single, economical package

New in VMware ESX Server 2.5

• Boot ESX Server hosts directly from Storage Area Networks (SANs)
• SAN Transparency lets virtual machines use native SAN storage with the same ease and flexibility as virtual disk files
• Use SAN-based utilities for virtual machine backup and replication
• Support for scripted and automated ESX Server host installations
• Common Information Model (CIM)-compliant API and Object Model for monitoring of ESX Server host and virtual machine storage resources from any CIM-aware client or management tool