VMware Infrastructure

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VMware Infrastructure
Developed by	VMware, Inc.
Latest release	3.5 Update 1 / April 11, 2008
Platform	x86-compatible
Genre	Virtual machine suite
License	Proprietary
Website	VMware Infrastructure

In the field of computing, VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI) consists of a suite of virtualization products from VMware, Inc. (a division of EMC Corporation). The suite includes:

VMware ESX Server version 3
VMware Virtual Center version 2
Virtual SMP (which allows a guest operating system to "see" up to 4 CPUs in the virtual machine).

Users can supplement this software bundle by purchasing optional products, such as VMotion, as well as distributed services such as:

VMware High Availability (HA)
VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
VMware Consolidated Backup

VMware Inc. released VMware Infrastructure 3 in June 2006. The suite comes in three "editions": Starter, Standard and Enterprise.

1 Known issues
- 1.1 Sizing limitations
- 1.2 Performance limitations
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Known issues

Known issues of VMware Infrastructure, as of January 2008, include the following:

[edit] Sizing limitations

Some limitations in VMware Infrastructure 3.5 may constrain the design of data centers:^[1]

Guest system maximum RAM: 64 GB
Number of guest CPUs: 4
Number of hosts in a HA cluster: 32
Number of hosts in a DRS cluster: 32
Size of RAM per server: 256 GB
Number of hosts managed by Virtual Center Server: 200
Number of virtual machines managed by Virtual Center Server: 2000

[edit] Performance limitations

In terms of performance, virtualization imposes a cost in the additional work a host CPU has to perform to virtualize its underlying hardware. Instructions that perform this extra work, and other activities that require virtualization, tend to lie in operating-system (OS) calls. In an unmodified operating system, OS calls introduce the greatest portion of virtualization overhead^{[citation needed]}.

Paravirtualization or other virtualization techniques may help with these issues. VMware and XenSource invented the Virtual Machine Interface for this purpose, and selected^{[weasel words]} operating systems currently address the problems.