Key Features and Components of vSphere Virtualization Platform

• Simplify IT operations at a lower cost – vSphere with Operations Management lowers operational overhead and dramatically simplifies the management of development, quality assurance and production IT environments that are both large and geographically distributed.

• Gain operational insight – vSphere with Operations Management enables IT to respond to performance trends proactively. It collects and analyzes performance data, correlates abnormalities and identifies the root cause of building performance issues.

• Optimize capacity – vSphere with Operations Management makes it easier to manage and optimize capacity planning. Unused virtual machines can be reclaimed, and underprovisioned virtual machines can be right-sized, helping to make the most efficient use of resources.

• VMware vSphere Hypervisor Architecture provides a robust, production-proven, high-performance virtualization layer. It enables multiple virtual machines to share hardware resources with performance that can match (and in some cases exceed) native throughput.

• VMware vSphere Virtual Symmetric Multiprocessing enables the use of ultra-powerful virtual machines that possess up to 128 virtual CPUs.

• VMware vSphere Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) allows virtual machines to access shared storage devices (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc.) and is a key enabling technology for other vSphere components such as VMware vSphere Storage vMotion®.

• VMware vSphere Storage APIs provide integration with supported third-party data protection, multipathing and disk array solutions.

• VMware vSphere Thin Provisioning provides dynamic allocation of shared storage capacity, enabling IT organizations to implement a tiered storage strategy while reducing storage spending by up to 50 percent.

• VMware vSphere vMotion® enables live migration of virtual machines between servers and across virtual switches with no disruption to users or loss of service, eliminating the need to schedule application downtime for planned server maintenance.

• VMware vSphere Storage vMotion enables live migration of virtual-machine disks with no disruption to users, eliminating the need to schedule application downtime for planned storage maintenance or storage migrations.

• VMware vSphere High Availability (HA) provides cost-effective, automated restart within minutes for all applications if a hardware or operating system failure occurs.

• VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) provides continuous availability of any application in the event of a hardware failure – with no data loss or downtime. For workloads up to 2-vCPU.

• VMware vSphere Data Protection™ is VMware’s backup and replication solution, powered by EMC Avamar. It delivers storageefficient backups through patented variable-length deduplication, rapid recovery and WAN-optimized replication for DR. Its vSphere-integration and simple user interface makes it an easy and effective backup tool for vSphere. It provides agentless, image-level VM backups to disk and application-aware protection for business-critical applications (e.g., Exchange, SQL Server) along with WAN-efficient, encrypted backup replication across sites.

• VMware vShield Endpoint™ secures virtual machines with offloaded antivirus and antimalware solutions without the need for agents inside the virtual machine.

• VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes enables abstraction for external storage (SAN and NAS) devices making them VM-aware.

• VMware vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management allows common management across storage tiers and dynamic storage class of service automation via a policy-driven control plane.

• VMware vSphere Content Library provides simple and effective centralized management for VM templates, virtual appliances, ISO images, and scripts.

Additional Components Available in Enterprise Edition

• VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler™ provides dynamic, hardware-independent load balancing and resource allocation for virtual machines in a cluster, using policy-driven automation to reduce management complexity while meeting SLAs.

• VMware vSphere Distributed Power Management™ automates energy efficiency in vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler clusters by continuously optimizing server power consumption within each cluster.

• VMware vSphere Reliable Memory places critical vSphere components (such as the hypervisor) into memory regions identified as “reliable” on supported hardware. This further protects components from an uncorrectable memory error.

• VMware vSphere Big Data Extensions run Hadoop on vSphere to achieve higher utilization, reliability and agility. vSphere Big Data Extensions support multiple Hadoop distributions and make it seamless for IT to deploy, run and manage Hadoop workloads on one common platform.

Additional Components Available in Enterprise Plus Edition (also inclusive of Enterprise Edition Components listed earlier)

• VMware vSphere Distributed Switch simplifies and enhances virtual-machine networking in vSphere environments and enables those environments to use third-party distributed virtual switches.

• VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control and VMware vSphere Network I/O Control set storage and network quality-of-service priorities for guaranteed access to resources.

• VMware vSphere Auto Deploy™ performs quick, as-needed deployment of additional vSphere hosts. When vSphere Auto Deploy is running, it pushes out update images, eliminating patching and the need to schedule patch windows.

• VMware vSphere Host Profiles help IT administrators simplify host deployment and compliance.