What is VMware Infrastructure?

Companies needing reliable infrastructure can’t always afford the physical servers required for their production environments. By using one or more physical host servers and virtualization, businesses and managed service providers get the infrastructure they need at a more affordable cost.

Virtualization decouples physical hardware from the operating system providing better utilization of resources and flexibility. In addition, virtualization allows multiple virtual machines (VMs) with independent operating systems and applications to run isolated and side-by-side on the same physical machines.

Join us as we take a look at what is VMware infrastructure, its components, and some of the benefits for businesses and agencies.

What is VMware Infrastructure?

VMware Infrastructure is a complete infrastructure virtualization suite offering comprehensive: 

• Virtualization.
• Centralized Management.
• Resource Optimization. 
• Application Availability.
• Operational Automation Capabilities.

VMware infrastructure aggregates the underlying physical hardware resources across multiple systems and provides pools of virtual resources to the virtual environment.

VMware Infrastructure offers a set of distributed services that allows high availability, consolidated backup of your entire virtual datacenter, and concentrated policy-driven resource allocation. In addition, these distributed services enable organizations to establish and cost-effectively meet their production goals.

VMware Infrastructure Components

There are several components that makeup VMware infrastructure. The following individual components represent powerful pieces of your virtual infrastructure.

VMware ESX Server

VMware ESX Server is the virtualization layer run on physical servers that abstracts processor, memory, storage, and networking resources into multiple virtual machines. There are two different versions of the ESX Server:

• ESX Server 3: Software that is installable and is purchased separately from your physical hardware.
• ESX Server 3i: Not installable software, but the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) embeds it in the physical hardware.

VMware vCenter Server

VMware vCenter Server (formerly known as VirtualCenter Server) is central to configuring, provisioning, and managing your virtual environments.

VMware Infrastructure Client (VI Client)

VMware Infrastructure Client (VI Client) allows remote connectivity to vCenter or individual ESX Server interfaces from any Windows PC.

VMware Infrastructure Web Access (VI Web Access)

VMware Infrastructure Web Access (VI Web Access) is a web interface for VM management and remote console access.

VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS)

VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is a high‐performance cluster file system for ESX Server VMs.

VMware Virtual Symmetric Multi‐Processing (SMP)

VMware Virtual Symmetric Multi‐Processing (SMP) allows a single VM to use multiple physical processors simultaneously.

VMware VMotion

VMware VMotion allows the live migration of VMs from one physical host to another with zero downtime. As a result, users enjoy high availability and complete integrity of transactions.

VMware Storage VMotion

VMware Storage VMotion allows the migration of VM files from one datastore to another without interruption. Datastores are file storage containers existing either local to the host server or remotely located across a network on another device, such as a storage area network (SAN).

VMware High Availability (HA)

As the name suggests, VMware High Availability (HA) provides high availability for VMs, which means that in server failure, affected virtual machines automatically restart on other production servers with spare capacity.

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is a feature that designates and balances computing capacity dynamically across groups of hardware resources. For a data center to reduce its power consumption significantly, VMware includes distributed power management (DPM) capabilities.

VMware Consolidated Backup (Consolidated Backup)

VMware Consolidated Backup, also called Consolidated Backup, is a feature that simplifies backup administration and reduces the load on ESX Servers. In addition, it gives an easy‐to‐use, centralized means for agent‐free backup of VMs.

VMware Infrastructure SDK

VMware Infrastructure SDK offers a standard interface for VMware and third‐party solutions to access the VMware infrastructure.

Final Thoughts

With VMware infrastructure, organizations have the tools to build reliable environments at the scale they need. VMware infrastructure provides several components that make creating virtual environments simple and efficient.

Liquid Web’s VMware multi-tenant and dedicated environments have what you need to deploy both simple and complex workloads in a managed environment. Our Sales team is waiting to assist you with finding out which option fits your business model. Reach out to us today!