Vmware Vsphere - Cisco Nexus 7000 Design Manual

FlexPod Design Details

VMware vSphere

VMware vSphere is a virtualization platform for holistically managing large collections of infrastructure
resources such as CPUs, storage, networking; as a seamless, versatile, and dynamic operating
environment. Unlike traditional operating systems that manage an individual machine, the VMware
vSphere aggregates the infrastructure of an entire data center to create a single powerhouse with
resources that can be allocated quickly and dynamically to any application in need.
The VMware vSphere provides revolutionary benefits, but with a practical, nondisruptive evolutionary
process for legacy applications. Existing applications can be deployed on VMware vSphere with no
changes to the application or the OS on which they are running.
VMware vSphere provides a set of application services that enable applications to achieve unparalleled
levels of availability, and scalability. As shown in
to meet numerous application and enterprise demands. The VMware vSphere 5.1 built on FlexPod
integrated system highlights the following vSphere features to deliver:
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VMware vSphere 5.1 on FlexPod with Nexus 7000 Using FCoE
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Availability
Workload mobility via vMotion
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High Availability through vSphere clustering technology offering virtual machine resiliency in
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the event of physical server or guest OS failures
Automation
VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) offering dynamic workload distribution to
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align resource utilization with business priorities and compute capacity. DRS provides efficient
use of compute resources and subsequently power consumption.
Compute
– VMware vSphere ESXi hypervisor providing efficient memory, storage and compute
abstraction for virtual machines
Network
– VMware vSphere supports third party virtual distributed switches such as the Cisco Nexus
1000v providing a resilient and fully integrated virtualized network access layer.
Storage
– Thin provisioning allows over provisioning of storage resources to improve storage utilization
and improve capacity planning
Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is a clustered file system allowing multiple hosts
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simultaneous read and writes access to a single volume located on a SCSI-based device over FC,
FCoE or iSCSI. VMFS-5 supports a maximum of 32 hosts connected to a single volume that
may be up to 64 TB in size.
Figure 5, VMware vSphere delivers core capabilities