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VMWARE VIRTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE

INDEX

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What is Virtualization?...........................3
How Does Virtualization Work?..............3
History of Virtualization.........................4
The Need for x86 Virtualization..............4
Top 5 Reasons to Adopt Virtualization
Software................................................5
The VMware Approach to Virtualization. 6
What is a Virtual Machine?.....................7
Virtual Infrastructure.............................9
What is a Virtual Infrastructure?...........9
VMware Infrastructure Suite
Components.........................................11
Virtual Machines: Building Blocks of the
Virtual Infrastructure...........................13
ESX Server 3........................................14
vSMP - Vitrual Symmetric Multi-
Processing............................................15
VMFS – Virtual Machine File system.....16
VC - Virtual Center...............................17
Features of VC......................................18
VMware VMotion..................................24
VMware DRS ........................................25
VMware HA ..........................................26
VMware Consolidated Backup VCB.......27

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Glossary...............................................27
What is Virtualization?
Virtualization is a proven software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT
landscape and fundamentally changing the way that people compute.

Today’s powerful x86 computer hardware was originally designed to run only a single
operating system and a single application, but virtualization breaks that bond,
making it possible to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the
same computer at the same time, increasing the utilization and flexibility
of hardware.

Virtualization is a technology that can benefit anyone who uses a computer, from IT
professionals and Mac enthusiasts to commercial businesses and government
organizations. Join the millions of people around the world who use virtualization to
save time, money and energy while achieving more with the computer hardware they
already own.

In market we have many companies like Microsoft (Hyper-v), Zen, Citrix, VMware etc
who are into software virtualization and I will be concentrating on the most popular
and powerful software virtualization product ESX from VMware. Today, VMware is
the global leader in x86 virtualization and has achieved success that is building
momentum for virtualization in all x86 computers

How Does Virtualization Work?

In essence, virtualization lets you transform hardware into software. Use software
such as VMware ESX to transform or “virtualize” the hardware resources of an x86-
based computer—including the CPU, RAM, hard disk and network controller—to
create a fully functional virtual machine that can run its own operating system and
applications just like a “real” computer.

Multiple virtual machines share hardware resources without interfering with each
other so that you can safely run several operating systems and applications at the
same time on a single computer.

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History of Virtualization
Virtualization is a proven concept that was first developed in the 1960s to partition
large, mainframe hardware. Today, computers based on x86 architecture are faced
with the same problems of rigidity and underutilization that mainframes faced in the
1960s. . VMware invented virtualization for the x86 platform in the 1990s to address
underutilization and other issues, overcoming many challenges in the process.

In 1998, VMware introduced virtualization to x86 systems as a means to efficiently

address many of these challenges and to transform x86 systems into general
purpose, shared hardware infrastructure that offers full isolation, mobility and
operating system choice for application environments.

The Need for x86 Virtualization

 Low Infrastructure Utilization. Typical x86 server deployments achieve an average
utilization of only 10% to 15% of total capacity, according to International Data
Corporation (IDC), a market research firm. Organizations typically run one
application per server to avoid the risk of vulnerabilities in one application
affecting the availability of another application on the same server.

 Increasing Physical Infrastructure Costs. The operational costs to support growing

physical infrastructure have steadily increased. Most computing infrastructure
must remain operational at all times, resulting in power consumption, cooling and
facilities costs that do not vary with utilization levels.

 Increasing IT Management Costs. As computing environments become more

complex, the level of specialized education and experience required for
infrastructure management personnel and the associated costs of such personnel

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have increased. Organizations spend disproportionate time and resources on

manual tasks associated with server maintenance, and thus require more
personnel to complete these tasks.

 Insufficient Failover and Disaster Protection. Organizations are increasingly

affected by the downtime of critical server applications and inaccessibility of
critical end user desktops. The threat of security attacks, natural disasters, health
pandemics and terrorism has elevated the importance of business continuity
planning for both desktops and servers.
 High Maintenance end-user desktops. Managing and securing enterprise desktops
present numerous challenges. Controlling a distributed desktop environment and
enforcing management, access and security policies without impairing users’
ability to work effectively is complex and expensive. Numerous patches and
upgrades must be continually applied to desktop environments to eliminate
security vulnerabilities.

Top 5 Reasons to Adopt Virtualization Software

 Server Consolidation and Infrastructure Optimization: Virtualization makes

it possible to achieve significantly higher resource utilization by pooling common
infrastructure resources and breaking the legacy “one application to one server”
model.

 Physical Infrastructure Cost Reduction: With virtualization, you can reduce

the number of servers and related IT hardware in the data center. This leads to
reductions in real estate, power and cooling requirements, resulting in
significantly lower IT costs.

 Improved Operational Flexibility & Responsiveness: Virtualization offers a

new way of managing IT infrastructure and can help IT administrators spend less
time on repetitive tasks such as provisioning, configuration, monitoring and
maintenance.

 Increased Application Availability & Improved Business Continuity:

Eliminate planned downtime and recover quickly from unplanned outages with

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the ability to securely backup and migrate entire virtual environments with no
interruption in service.

 Improved Desktop Manageability & Security: Deploy, manage and monitor

secure desktop environments that end users can access locally or remotely, with
or without a network connection, on almost any standard desktop, laptop or
tablet PC.

The VMware Approach to Virtualization

The VMware approach to virtualization inserts a thin layer of software directly on the
computer hardware or on a host operating system. This software layer creates virtual
machines and contains a virtual machine monitor or “hypervisor” that allocates
hardware resources dynamically and transparently so that multiple operating
systems can run concurrently on a single physical computer without even knowing it.

However, virtualizing a single physical computer is just the beginning. VMware offers
a robust virtualization platform that can scale across hundreds of interconnected
physical computers and storage devices to form an entire virtual infrastructure.

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Before Virtualization: After Virtualization:

• Single OS image per machine
• Software and hardware tightly coupled
• Running multiple applications on same
machine often creates conflict
• Underutilized resources
• Inflexible and costly infrastructure
• Hardware-independence of operating
system and applications
• Virtual machines can be provisioned to any
system
• Can manage OS and application as a single
unit by encapsulating them into virtual
machines

What is a Virtual Machine?

A virtual machine is a tightly isolated software container that can run its own
operating systems and applications as if it were a physical computer. A virtual
machine behaves exactly like a physical computer and contains it own virtual (ie,
software-based) CPU, RAM hard disk and network interface card (NIC).

An operating system can’t tell the difference between a virtual machine and a
physical machine, nor can applications or other computers on a network. Even the
virtual machine thinks it is a “real” computer. Nevertheless, a virtual machine is
composed entirely of software and contains no hardware components whatsoever. As
a result, virtual machines offer a number of distinct advantages over physical
hardware.

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Each virtual machine can use up to 16GB RA M and 4 CPUs with

VMware Virtual SMPTM

Virtual Machines Benefits:

In general, VMware virtual machines possess four key characteristics that benefit the
user:

 Compatibility: Virtual machines are compatible with all standard x86

computers
 Isolation: Virtual machines are isolated from each other as if physically
separated
 Encapsulation: Virtual machines encapsulate a complete computing
environment
 Hardware independence: Virtual machines run independently of underlying
hardware

Compatibility
Just like a physical computer, a virtual machine hosts its own guest operating
system and applications, and has all the components found in a physical
computer (motherboard, VGA card, network card controller, etc). As a result,
virtual machines are completely compatible with all standard x86 operating
systems, applications and device drivers, so you can use a virtual machine to
run all the same software that you would run on a physical x86 computer.

Isolation

While virtual machines can share the physical resources of a single computer,
they remain completely isolated from each other as if they were separate
physical machines. If, for example, there are four virtual machines on a single
physical server and one of the virtual machines crashes, the other three
virtual machines remain available. Isolation is an important reason why the

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availability and security of applications running in a virtual environment is far

superior to applications running in a traditional, non-virtualized system.

Encapsulation

A virtual machine is essentially a software container that bundles or

“encapsulates” a complete set of virtual hardware resources, as well as an
operating system and all its applications, inside a software package.
Encapsulation makes virtual machines incredibly portable and easy to
manage. For example, you can move and copy a virtual machine from one
location to another just like any other software file, or save a virtual machine
on any standard data storage medium, from a pocket-sized USB flash memory
card to an enterprise storage area networks (SANs).

Hardware Independence

Virtual machines are completely independent from their underlying physical

hardware. For example, you can configure a virtual machine with virtual
components (eg, CPU, network card, SCSI controller) that are completely
different from the physical components that are present on the underlying
hardware. Virtual machines on the same physical server can even run
different kinds of operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc).

When coupled with the properties of encapsulation and compatibility,

hardware independence gives you the freedom to move a virtual machine
from one type of x86 computer to another without making any changes to the
device drivers, operating system, or applications. Hardware independence
also means that you can run a heterogeneous mixture of operating systems
and applications on a single physical computer.

Virtual Infrastructure
The introduction of virtualization technology presents a number of opportunities for
driving capital and operational efficiency above and beyond the simple benefit of
safe partitioning. VMware's customers have harnessed the power of virtualization to
better manage IT capacity, to provide better service levels, and to streamline IT
processes. We have coined a term for virtualizing the IT infrastructure–we call it
the virtual infrastructure.

What is a Virtual Infrastructure?

In essence, a virtual infrastructure is a dynamic mapping of physical resources to
business needs. While a virtual machine represents the physical resources of a single
computer, a virtual infrastructure represents the physical resources of the entire IT
environment, aggregating x86 computers and their attached network and storage
into a unified pool of IT resources.

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Structurally, a virtual infrastructure consists of the following components:

 Single-node hypervisors to enable full virtualization of each x86 computer.

 A set of virtualization-based distributed system infrastructure services such as
resource management to optimize available resources among virtual
machines.
 Automation solutions that provide special capabilities to optimize a particular
IT process such as provisioning or disaster recovery.

Traditional Infrastructure:

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VMware Infrastructure Suite Components

VMware Infrastructure includes the following products:

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• ESX Server 3 with VMware VMFS and Virtual SMP (vSMP)

• VirtualCenter 2 with VMotion, VMware DRS, and VMware HA
• Consolidated Backup

Single Entity (Server) in a Virtual Infrastructure:

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Virtual Machines: Building Blocks of the Virtual

Infrastructure
Virtual machines are a fundamental building block of a much larger solution:
the virtual infrastructure. While a virtual machine represents the hardware resources
of an entire computer, a virtual infrastructure represents the interconnected
hardware resources of an entire IT infrastructure—including computers, network
devices and shared storage resources. Organizations of all sizes use VMware
solutions to build virtual server and desktop infrastructures that improve the
availability, security and manageability of mission-critical applications.

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ESX Server 3
VMware ESX Server is the building block of VMware Infrastructure

ESX Server installs directly on the hardware, or “bare metal”, of each host server
contributing resources to the virtual infrastructure. ESX Server provides a robust
virtualization layer that enables each server to host multiple secure and portable
virtual machines running side by side on the same physical server. The bare metal
architecture gives ESX Server complete control over the server resources allocated to
each virtual machine, and provides for near-native virtual machine performance with
enterprise-class scalability.

A single ESX Server can host up to 128 running virtual machines, and given typical
workloads, they often support about 10 running virtual machines per host processor.
Each virtual machine can be configured to access up to 16GB of memory and up to 4
processors when using VMware Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing (vSMP). Sharing
the physical server resources among a number of virtual machines dramatically
increases hardware utilization and decreases capital cost. ESX Server provides very
granular resource management, allowing it to share the resources of the physical
server across the running virtual machines to maximize server utilization while
ensuring virtual machine isolation. Virtualization acts as a resource multiplier,
allowing a 4-way server with 32GB of memory to boot 32 virtual machines from a
storage area network that collectively think they have 64 GB of memory, 32 virtual
disks and 64 virtual network cards. IT managers can take advantage of the fact that
workloads are sometimes idle and that different applications are bound by different
hardware resources (i.e., some applications are memory bound, some are CPU
bound) and that peak usage occurs at different times for different workloads. Virtual
machine resource allocations can be established with minimum, maximum, and
proportional share amounts for CPU, memory, disk and network bandwidth, allowing
applications to safely use greater physical resources periodically without requiring a
constant allocation. ESX Server delivers enterprise data center manageability when
deployed with VirtualCenter. Virtual machines have built-in high availability, resource
management and security features that provide better service levels to software
applications than static physical environments can deliver. VMware Infrastructure can
run on certified hardware ranging from the largest x86 data center systems with
multiple core processors and high-end fibre channel SAN storage arrays to entry-level
white box servers using lower cost NAS and iSCSI storage.

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vSMP - Vitrual Symmetric Multi-Processing

VMware Virtual SMP provides Multi-processor virtual machines for

demanding workloads

VMware Virtual SMP™ enhances virtual machine performance by enabling a single

virtual machine to use multiple physical processors, or CPUs, in a host server
simultaneously. Virtual SMP co-schedules non-idle virtual processors synchronously
while allowing over-commitment of the processors. Idle virtual processors can be de-
scheduled with the guest operating system running inside the virtual machine and
then re-used for other tasks. Virtual SMP periodically moves processing tasks
between the available processors to re-balance the workload. A unique VMware
feature, Virtual SMP enables virtualization of the most processor-intensive enterprise
applications such as databases, ERP and CRM.

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VMFS – Virtual Machine File system

VMware VMFS enables innovative distributed services

Virtual machines are completely encapsulated in virtual disk files that can be either stored
locally on the ESX Server or centrally using shared SAN, NAS or iSCSI storage. The latter
configuration is more typical in enterprise environments where virtual machines are
centrally accessible to other ESX Server installations using shared SAN, NAS or iSCSI storage
and the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS). This configuration is much more powerful as it
allows a resource pool of multiple installations of ESX Server to concurrently access the
same files to boot and run virtual machines, effectively virtualizing the virtual machine
storage.

While conventional file systems allow only one server to have read-write access to the file
system at a given time, VMware VMFS is a high-performance cluster file system that allows
multiple installations of ESX Server read-write access to the same virtual machine storage
concurrently. VMFS provides on-disk locking to ensure that multiple servers do not power a
virtual machine at the same time. Should a server fail, the on-disk lock for each virtual
machine is released so that virtual machines can be restarted on other physical servers. The
cluster file system enables innovative and unique virtualization-based distributed services.
These services include live migration of running virtual machines from one physical server to
another, automatic restart of failed virtual machines on a different physical server, and the
clustering of virtual machines across different physical servers. As all virtual machines see
their storage as local attached SCSI disks, no changes are needed to virtual machine storage
configurations if they are migrated to another physical server.

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VC - Virtual Center
Put Efficiency and Control at Your Fingertips. VMware VirtualCenter
manages all VMware Infrastructure

A VirtualCenter Management Server can centrally manage hundreds of ESX Server

hosts and thousands of virtual machines, delivering operational automation, resource
optimization and high availability to IT environments.

VirtualCenter provides a single Windows management client for all tasks called the
Virtual Infrastructure client. Virtual machines can be provisioned, configured, started,
stopped, deleted, relocated and remotely accessed with keyboard and mouse
control. The Virtual Infrastructure client is also available in a Web browser
implementation for access from any networked device. The browser version of the
client makes providing a user with access to a virtual machine as easy as sending a
bookmark URL.

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VirtualCenter provides a centralized view of many ESX Server hosts

and virtual machines.

Features of VC
The following is a comprehensive list of VMware VirtualCenter features.

 Architecture

 Performance and Scalability

 Management

 Server and virtual machine management

 System monitoring

 Distributed Resource Optimization

 High Availability

 Security

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Architecture

VirtualCenter is composed of five main components:

 VirtualCenter Management Server is the central control node for

configuring, provisioning and managing virtualized IT environments. The
Management Server runs as a service on Microsoft® Windows 2000,
Microsoft® Windows XP Professional and Microsoft® Windows Server
2003.

 VirtualCenter Database is used to store persistent information about

the physical servers, resource pools and virtual machines managed by the
VirtualCenter Management Server. The database resides on standard
versions of Oracle, Microsoft® SQL Server, or Microsoft® MSDE.

 Virtual Infrastructure Client allows administrators and users to connect

remotely to the VirtualCenter Management Server or individual ESX
Servers from any Windows PC.

 VirtualCenter Agent connects VMware ESX with the VirtualCenter

Management Server.

 Virtual Infrastructure Web Access allows virtual machine management

and access to virtual machine graphical consoles without installing a
client.

Performance and Scalability

 Large-scale management. Manage hundreds of servers and thousands

of virtual machines. VirtualCenter is designed from the ground up to
handle the largest IT environments. With VirtualCenter 2.5, manage up to
200 hosts and 2000 virtual machines with a single VirtualCenter instance.

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Management

 Virtual machine provisioning and migration. Provision virtual

machines instantaneously and move virtual machines between physical
servers

 Integrated Physical to Virtual machine conversion. Manage multiple

simultaneous conversions to virtual machines. Convert physical machines,
virtual machine formats such as Microsoft VirtualServer or VirtualPC,
backup images of physical machines such as Symantec Backup Exec
LiveStateRecovery, Ghost 9 , VMware Consolidated backup images to
running virtual machines.

 Guided Consolidation. Guide first time virtualization users, in simpler

Windows environments through the consolidation process workflow.
Through a wizard based, tutorial like interface, Guided consolidation
automatically discovers physical servers, helps analyze their performance
and triggers the conversion of physical to virtual machines placed
intelligently on the right host.

 Deployment wizard. Create new virtual machines with a user friendly

wizard. Customize network identities and operating system parameters to
make new instances unique.

 Re-designed virtual machine templates. Save virtual machines as

templates that can be instantiated in minutes. Minimize errors and
downtime by establishing configuration standards for virtual machines. Re-
designed templates support easy virtual machine patching and updating.
Templates are stored on shared storage for greater reliability.

 Virtual machine cloning. Copy existing virtual machines when a new

instance of a server is needed.

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 Cold migration of virtual machines. Move a powered off virtual

machine from one physical server to another by dragging and dropping
the virtual machine icon.
 Live migration of virtual machines. Migrate running virtual machines
from one physical server to another with VMware VMotion.

 Live migration of virtual machine disks. Migrate running virtual

machine disks from one storage array to another with VMware Storage
VMotion.

Server and virtual machine management

 Virtual Infrastructure Client. Manage VMware ESX servers, virtual

machines, and VirtualCenter Server with a common user interface.

 Virtual Infrastructure Web Access. Manage virtual machines and

access virtual machine graphical consoles without installing a client.

 VMware ESX configuration. Centralize management and configuration

of all VMware ESX servers in VirtualCenter.

 Enhanced inventory model. Manage the complete inventory of virtual

machines, resource pools and physical servers with greater visibility into
object relationships. The new inventory model provides the flexibility to
organize objects into folders and create two separate hierarchical views.

 Enhanced object model. Manage virtualized IT environment with a

consistent object model covering all entities such as virtual machines,
physical servers, and resource pools.

 Interactive topology maps. Visualize the relationships between

physical servers, virtual machines, networks and storage. Topology maps
allow to easily verify correct configuration for distributed services such as
VMotion, VMware DRS and VMware HA.
 Centralized licensing. Manage all VMware software licenses with an
embedded FlexNet licensing server and a single license file.

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System monitoring

Continuously monitor physical servers and virtual machine availability and

utilization from a single interface.

 Alerts and notifications. Set green, yellow and red level alarms for
CPU, memory and heartbeat states to manage and pre-empt problems.
Alarm triggers generate automated notifications and alerts. Schedule
automatic execution of system management tasks such as sending SNMP
traps, sending emails, running management scripts, suspending, powering
off, and resetting virtual machines.

 Enhanced performance graphs. Monitor and analyze virtual machines,

resource pools and server utilization and availability with detailed
performance graphs. Performance metrics can be defined with several
levels of granularity and can be viewed in real time, or across a specified
time interval.

 Reports. Export VirtualCenter data to HTML and Excel formats for

integration with other reporting tools and offline analysis.

Distributed Resource Optimization

 Resource management for virtual machines. Allocate processor and

memory resources to virtual machines running on the same physical
servers. Establish minimum, maximum, and proportional resource shares
for CPU, memory, disk and network bandwidth. Modify allocations while
virtual machines are running. Enable applications to dynamically acquire
more resources to accommodate peak performance.

 Dynamic allocation of resources. VMware DRS continuously monitors

utilization across resource pools and intelligently allocates available
resources among virtual machines based on pre-defined rules that reflect
business needs and changing priorities. The result is a self-managing,
highly optimized and efficient IT environment with built-in load balancing.
 Energy efficient resource optimization. VMware Distributed Power
Management (experimental) continuously monitors resource requirements
and power consumption across a DRS cluster. When the cluster needs
fewer resources, it consolidates workloads and puts hosts in standby mode
to reduce power consumption. When resource requirements of workloads
increase, DPM brings powered-down hosts back online to ensure service
levels are met.

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High Availability

 Automatic restart of virtual machines with VMware HA. Provide an easy

to use and cost-effective failover solution.

Security

 Fine-grained access control. Secure the environment with

configurable, tiered group definitions and fine-grained permissions.

 Integration with Microsoft® Active Directory. Base access controls

on existing Microsoft® Active Directory authentication mechanisms.

 Custom roles and permissions. Enhance security and flexibility with

user-defined roles. VirtualCenter users with appropriate privileges can
create custom roles such as night shift operator or backup administrator.
Restrict access to the entire inventory of virtual machines, resource pools
and servers by assigning users to these custom roles.

 Audit trails. Maintain a record of significant configuration changes and

the administrator who initiated them. Export reports for event tracking.

 Session management. Discover and if necessary terminate

VirtualCenter user sessions.

 Patch Management. Enforce compliance to patch standards through

automated scanning and patching of online VMware ESX hosts and select
Microsoft and Linux virtual machines with VMware Update Manager.
Reduce security exposure in the environment through secure patching of
offline virtual machines and reduce downtime through automatic
snapshots prior to patching and rollback. Integration of VMware Update
Manager with VMware DRS enables zero downtime VMware ESX host
patching.

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VMware VMotion

VMware VMotion enables the live migration of virtual machines across

hosts

VMware VMotion enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one
physical server to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability, and
complete transaction integrity. Live migration of virtual machines enables companies
to perform hardware maintenance without scheduling downtime and disrupting
business operations. VMotion also allows virtual machines to be continuously and
automatically optimized within resource pools for maximum hardware utilization,
flexibility, and availability.

VMotion is Key for VMware High Availability HA and Distributed Resource

Scheduler DRS

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VMware DRS

DRS enable 80% utilization with guaranteed service levels

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) works with VMware Infrastructure to

continuously automate the balancing of virtual machine workloads across a cluster in
the virtual infrastructure. When a virtual machine is first started on the cluster,
VMware DRS selects the ESX Server host it runs on by automatically identifying a
machine with sufficient resources. If conditions on the selected host change (for
example, if other virtual machine activity increases to the point that the virtual
machine can’t meet its guaranteed resource allocation), VMware DRS will recognize
that condition and search for an alternate ESX Server host on the cluster that can
honor the resource allocations needed by the virtual machine. VMware DRS will then
use VMotion to migrate the virtual machine to the new host automatically and with
zero downtime for its users and applications. The result is a continuous balancing of
all server workloads across the virtual infrastructure.

Load Balancing and Resource Allocation

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VMware HA

HA provides easy to use, cost effective high availability

VMware High Availability (HA) provides easy to use, cost effective high availability for
applications running in virtual machines. The loss of an ESX Server host due to a
hardware failure is no longer a catastrophic event, but simply means that the
resource pool available to the cluster has been reduced. HA will manage the
reassignment and restart of the failed host’s virtual machines on the other ESX
Server hosts in the cluster with the VirtualCenter Global Scheduler making the
decisions on where to place the virtual machines to best meet resource guarantees.

High Availability

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VMware Consolidated Backup VCB

VCB delivers LAN-free backup with zero downtime

VMware Consolidated Backup provides an easy to use, centralized facility for LAN-
free backups that preserve file-level visibility.

Glossary

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Physical Machine
A Computer (Server/desktop/laptop etc).

Virtual Machine VM
A representation of a physical machine using software that provides an operating
environment which can run or host a guest operating system like Linux, windows,
Unix etc. In a physical machine there is a real CPU, RAM, NIC etc. But in a VM every
thing is virtual (Vcpu, vNIC etc), virtual in the sense they are software programs
running inside a virtualized OS like ESX.

Symmetric Multi-Processing SMP

SMP is more than one CPU on the board running in parallel to accomplish the same
job. All the CPUs connect to a single shared main memory in SMP architecture. SMP
systems allow any processor to work on any task no matter where the data for that
task are located in memory; with proper operating system support, SMP systems can
easily move tasks between processors to balance the workload efficiently.

Computer Network
A computer network is a group of interconnected computers.
Network Interface Card – NIC
A Network card, Network Adapter, LAN Adapter or NIC (network interface card) is a
piece of computer hardware designed to allow computers to communicate over
a computer network.

Memory
RAM inside a computer is referred as Memory in this document.

Disk
Hard Disk inside a computer is referred as Disk in this document.

SAN, NAS or iSCSI Storage

Like a Hard Disk which is a directly attached /internal storage (DAS) a server can
connect to external storage and these storages can be shared across many servers.
SAN refers to Storage Area Network (Fibre channel storage/FC storage), NAS refers to
Network Attached Storage and iSCSI is SCSI storage over ip network.

x86
The generic term x86 refers to the most commercially successful instruction set
architecture in the history of personal computing. It derived from the model numbers,
ending in "86", of the first few processor generations backward compatible with the
original Intel 8086. Since then, many additions and extensions have been added to
the x86 instruction set, almost consistently with full backwards compatibility.The
architecture has been implemented in processors from Intel, Cyrix, AMD, VIA, and
many others. The computers with CPU build on x86 architecture are referred to as
x86.

Infrastructure
Complete IT equipments like Servers, Storage, Network, Desktop etc, put together to
server the need of an organization is called as infrastructure.

VM Migration

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VM migration is nothing but moving a VM from one Host server to another Host
server with the help of VC.

Host
Host in this document refers to a single Server.

High Availability
Availability refers to the ability of the user community to access the system, whether
to submit new work, update or alter existing work, or collect the results of previous
work. If a user cannot access the system, it is said to be unavailable. Generally, the
term downtime is used to refer to periods when a system is unavailable. High
availability makes sure that there is approximately zero downtime for a system.

Workload
The load produced on a computer due to the application/tasks running on it is
referred to as workload.

Load Balancing
Balancing load on a system by dividing/switching workload between systems in a
multi system environment.

Server
Computer models intended for use in running server applications under heavy
workloads, also called operating units often unattended and for an extended period
of time. While any workstation computer is capable of acting as a server, a server
computer usually has special features intended to make it more suitable. These
features can include a faster CPU, faster and more plentiful RAM, and larger hard
drives. More obvious distinctions include redundancy in power supplies, network
connections, and devices as well as the modular design of so-called Blade
servers often used in server farms.

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