Virtualization

PrimeHarbor can assist you with your VMware Virtualization project.

VMware pioneered the Intel-based virtualization movement in 1999 with VMware Workstation and has leveraged their decade of experience to become the industry leader in enterprise virtualization. Their latest generation offering, VMware vSphere, provides unmatched excellence in resource utilization, availability, and cost savings with an easy to use single-pane-of-glass administrative interface.

Your company and its IT staff will benefit from the following VMware features:

• vMotion (one of vSphere’s most useful features) allows you to move a virtual machine from host to host with zero-downtime to the virtual machine. An exact copy of the guest’s memory and CPU state is migrated in real time.
• Storage vMotion (svMotion) allows you to migrate the virtual machine’s hard disks from one storage array to another without any downtime for the virtual machine.
• Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) manages vSphere cluster resources by moving virtual machines around to best balance CPU and memory utilization. This process can be fully automated, or DRS can provide recommendations for an administrator to approve. For performance purposes, specific virtual machines can be linked, so if one moves the other moves with it. If two virtual machines are paired for redundancy purposes, like DNS or database servers, DRS can be told that specific virtual machines must remain on separate hosts.
• Distributed Power Management, or DPM, is an offshoot of DRS. If DRS realizes you have more computing capacity than is currently needed, it can migrate virtual machines on to fewer hosts, and place the unneeded hosts in standby mode. This can provide a cost savings by reducing power and cooling costs at nights and on weekends when users are not actively on the systems.
• VMware High Availability (HA) monitors the state of ESXi hosts and the underlying operating system and will automatically restart them if there is a failure.
• VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) takes VMware HA one-step further. FT creates a secondary VM, and using the technologies behind vMotion, syncs the state of the primary with the secondary. Should the physical host the primary runs on fail, the secondary automatically takes over exactly where the primary left off. There is no downtime due to reboot, and the risk of inconsistent file systems is minimized. Fault Tolerance requires twice the CPU and memory resources, as the secondary VM is performing identical operations as the primary. There are some limits on the kinds of virtual machines that can run VMware Fault Tolerance.
• Thin Provisioning is a feature of many storage systems that allows the virtual machine administrator to allocate a certain sized virtual disk to a virtual machine, but the virtual machine will only use what the underlying operating system uses. This allows you to provision more space than your VM currently needs, without actually using any of that physical space until the guest OS requests it.
• Transparent Page Sharing allows multiple guests to share the same physical memory on the host if the memory pages are identical across guests. In an Operating-System homogeneous environment, this can lead to resource savings.

PrimeHarbor provides Turn-key VMware installations for small and medium sized businesses.