vSphere™ for Mid-Size & Enterprise Business

Leverage the power of virtualisation to transform your IT infrastructure into private clouds built on VMware vSphere—enabling IT to increase control through service-level automation. VMware vSphere, the industry's first cloud operating system, dramatically reduces capital and operating costs and maximizes IT efficiency—with the freedom to choose any application, OS, or hardware.

Optimise your IT infrastructure through server consolidation, automation, and high availability
Decrease downtime and improve reliability with business continuity and disaster recovery
Increase energy efficiency by running fewer servers and dynamically powering down unused servers with our green IT solutions

Features

VMware vSphere is the industry’s first cloud operating system, transforming datacenters into dramatically simplified cloud infrastructure and enabling the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services.

Leveraging VMware’s industry-leading technology and experience, VMware vSphere 4 delivers uncompromised control, in the most efficient manner, while fully preserving customer choice. 

Key Features

VMware vSphere comprises a number of components that transform industry standard hardware into a shared, main-frame like resilient environment with built in service level controls for all applications. The components of VMware vSphere are classified into:

Infrastructure services – These are components that comprehensively virtualise server, storage and network resources, aggregate them and allocate them precisely on demand to applications based on business priority.

Application services – These are components that provide built in service level controls to all applications running on the Cloud OS platform, regardless of application type or operating system.

VMware vCenter Server provides a central point of control for virtualisation management, essential for administering infrastructure and application services, with deep visibility into every aspect of virtual infrastructure, automation of day to day operational tasks and the scalability to manage large datacenter environments.

Infrastructure Services: Virtualise and Aggregate Hardware Resources

vCompute: vCompute services efficiently virtualise server resources and aggregate them into logical pools that can precisely be allocated to applications.

VMware ESX and VMware ESXi, provide a robust, production-proven, high performance virtualisation layer that abstract server hardware resources and allow their sharing by multiple virtual machines. Unique memory management and advanced scheduling capabilities of VMware ESX and ESXi allow for the highest consolidation ratios and the best application performance, in many
cases, even better than physical servers.

Achieve 8900 database transactions per second, enough to annually run 5 times the transaction traffic of VISA.
Achieve record number of Exchange mailboxes per physical server with the finely tuned performance of VMware ESX.
Support up to 16 Gbits/sec of web traffic - 3 times the daily traffic of Ebay.

VMware DRS aggregates compute resources across many clusters and dynamically allocates them to virtual machines based on business priorities, reducing management complexity through automation. VMware, included with VMware DRS, automates energy efficiency in DRS clusters by continuously optimising the power consumed in a DRS cluster.

vStorage: vStorage services abstract away from the complexity of back-end storage systems and enable the most efficient utilisation of storage in virtual environments.

VMware vStorage VMFS is a high performance cluster file system which abstracts away the complexity of storage hardware from applications. VMFS allows efficient sharing and controls concurrent access to storage by virtualised servers.
VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning allows storage purchases to be deferred until they are really required, reducing storage
spending by up to 50%.

vNetwork: vNetwork services enable optimal administration and management of networking in virtual environments.

VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch simplifies and enhances the provisioning, administration and control of virtual machine networking in VMware vSphere environments.

Application Services: Built in Service Level Controls for Applications

Application services can be enabled simply and uniformly for any application running inside VMware virtual machines; providing IT with simple built-in controls over application service levels.

Availability:

Planned Downtime

VMware VMotion eliminates the need to schedule application downtime due to planned server maintenance through live migration of virtual machines across servers with no disruption to users or loss of service.

VMware Storage VMotion eliminates the need to schedule application downtime due to planned storage maintenance or during storage migrations by enabling live migration of virtual machine disks with no disruption to users or loss of service.

Unplanned Downtime

VMware HA provides cost effective, automated restart within minutes for all applications in the event of hardware or operating
system failures.
VMware Fault Tolerance provides continuous availability, without any data loss or downtime, to any application.
VMware Data Recovery provides simple, cost effective, agentless backup and recovery for virtual machines.

Security:

VMware vShield Zones simplifies application security by enforcing corporate security policies at the application level in a shared environment, while still maintaining trust and network segmentation of users and sensitive data.
VMware VMsafe enables the use of security products that work in conjunction with the virtualisation layer to provide higher levels of security to virtual machines than even physical servers.

Scalability:

VMware DRS dynamically load balances server resources to deliver the right resource to the right application based on business priority; allowing applications to shrink and grow as needed.
Hot add enables CPU and memory to be added to virtual machines when needed without disruption or downtime.
Hot plug enables virtual storage and network devices to be added to or removed from virtual machines without disruption or
downtime.
Hot extend of virtual disks allows virtual storage to be added to running virtual machines without disruption or downtime.


VMware vSphere Edition for Mid-Size & Enterprise Business

VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus delivers the full range of VMware vSphere features, transforming datacenters into dramatically simplified environments, offering the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services.

VMware vSphere Enterprise includes key features for minimising downtime, protecting data, and automating resource management.

VMware vSphere Advanced provides a strategic consolidation solution, protecting business-critical applications against planned and unplanned downtime, providing superior application availability.

VMware vSphere Standard offers an entry solution for basic consolidation of applications, reducing hardware costs while accelerating application deployment.

VMware's Cloud OS

VMware Fault Tolerance