The Virtual Datacentre

• With VMware Infrastructure at its core, Hostway's virtualization platform lets IT resources be managed like a shared utility, so that they can be dynamically provisioned to different business units and projects without worrying about the underlying hardware differences and limitations.

• Hostway Clients can effectively set themselves up in their own Virtual Datacentre using VirtualCenter Server.

The figure below shows the key elements in the virtual datacentre. You can view, configure, and manage these key elements using VirtualCenter Server. These elements include:

• Computing and memory resources called hosts, clusters, and resource pools
• Storage resources called datastores
• Networking resources called networks
• Virtual machines

The Virtual Datacentre

A host is the virtual representation of the computing and memory resources of a physical machine running ESX Server. When one or more physical machines are grouped together to work and be managed as a whole, the aggregate computing and memory resources form a cluster. Machines can be dynamically added or removed from a cluster. Computing and memory resources from hosts and clusters can be finely partitioned into a hierarchy of resource pools.

Datastores are virtual representations of combinations of underlying physical storage resources in the datacenter. These physical storage resources can come from the local SCSI, SAS, or SATA disks of the server; the Fiber Channel SAN disk arrays; the iSCSI SAN disk arrays; or Network Attached Storage (NAS) arrays.

Networks in the virtual environment connect virtual machines to each other or to the physical network outside of the virtual datacenter.

Virtual machines are designated to a particular host, cluster or resource pool, and a datastore when they are created. A virtual machine consumes resources like an appliance consuming electricity. After being powered-on they consume resources dynamically as the workload increases or give back resources dynamically as the workload decreases.

Provisioning of virtual machines is much faster and easier than physical machines. New virtual machines can be created in seconds. When a virtual machine is provisioned, the appropriate operating system and applications can be installed unaltered on the virtual machine to handle a particular workload just as though they were being installed on a physical machine.To make things easier, a virtual machine can even be provisioned with the operating system and applications already installed and configured.

Resources are provisioned to virtual machines based on the policies set by the system administrator who owns the resources. The policies can reserve a set of resources for a particular virtual machine to guarantee its performance. The policies can also prioritize and set a variable portion of the total resources to each virtual machine. A virtual machine will be prevented from being powered-on (to consume resources) if doing so would violate the resource allocation policies.

For further infomation please call us on 0808 180 1880 (free within the UK) or +44(0)20 7538 8000 (outside the UK), or alternatively send an email to solutions@hostway.co.uk