VMWARE VSPHERE 5: The Efficient Way To Improve Your IT Scalability and Security

VMARE VSPHERE is the world’s leading server virtualization platform that allows businesses, organizations, institutions and individuals build their own cloud infrastructure in their data center and remote sites. The VMARE VSPHERE 5 helps institutions and organizations to achieve their virtualization and cloud computing needs by offering powerful server virtualization that allows virtualization of x86 server resources while also aggregating them into pools of multiple workloads. The platform also provides robust security that protects the data and applications of your company with the most secure platform.

The ability to offer network services that have been optimized for virtual environment and simplified for easy management and administration has made it efficient and effective. Other factors that you would enjoy by subscribing to the service include high availability, consistent automation and efficient storage. The platform allows you to maximize your uptime across cloud infrastructure by eliminating planned downtime for server and storage maintenance while reducing unplanned downtime.

The platform further offers an efficient storage system that helps you reduce the complexity offered by back end storage systems while also enabling efficient utilization in storage and cloud infrastructures. The platform offers consistent automation that helps reduce the operating expenditure of your business while also minimizing the errors common in routine tasks thanks to the accurate and repeatable solutions.
 
VMWARE VSPHERE 5- Features
The features of VMWARE can be categorized into seven categories that include compute, network, availability, automation, security, management and storage.

Compute
To improve your computing environment, VMWARE VSPHERE 5 has incorporated different aspects into the platform such as vSphere ESXi, vMotion, Big Data Extensions and Distributed Resources Scheduler. vSphere ESXi is a robust virtualization layer that abstracts server hardware resources and enables them to be shared by multiple virtual machines. The vMotion helps eliminate the application downtime as a result of planned maintenance by allowing you to move live virtual machines between hosts, which make your services always available.
 
Distributed resources scheduler is an important feature that aligns your business priorities with compute resources by enabling automatic balanced load across the hosts. It also helps reduce the power consumption by turning off the hosts during low load periods. Big data extensions help the system achieve higher reliability, utilization and agility.

Availability
The platform has been optimized to ensure high availability across your entire virtualized IT environment without the complexity and cost of traditional clustering solutions. This is done with the help of App HA, which detects and recovers from an OS or application failure. The system further ensures availability by ensuring availability for applications without any data loss as a result of server failures. The system also has an in-built replication feature that helps you reduce operation cost by eliminating the need for third party replication. It also features agentless disk backups that safeguard your data while also ensuring minimal disk use through de-duplication.

Network
The platform through network I/O control offers you full control over your network resources allowing you to define priority access based on business rules. It also features a distributed switch that helps you control everything ranging from administration to network provision and monitoring from one location.

Automation
The VMWARE VSPHERE 5 auto deploy feature allows you to deploy and patch the vSphere hosts easily and quickly. It also features an update manager that helps you reduce time spent on routine remediation by automatically patching, tracking and updating vSphere.
Management
The platform through vCenter Server allows centralized management of the platform, which ensures efficiency and quick time management. The platform also has a vRealize Orchestrator feature that lets you assemble your workflows through an easy to use drag and drop interface.

Storage
It has placed a lot of emphasis on the storage feature of the system. It has incorporated various features into the system to improve your storage experience. It uses a storage DRS to offer smart virtual machine placement and balanced load in accordance with your input/ output storage and latency capacity. The profile driven storage helps to streamline your storage by grouping your storage resources as per your user-defined policies.

The storage vMotion improves your storage experience by ensuring smooth storage migration by eliminating input/ output and virtual machine bottlenecks. It also helps to free up valuable storage capacity. The system also features a storage input/ output control feature that helps prioritize storage access through continuous monitoring of input/ output storage loads. It also dynamically allocates the available input/ output resources to your virtual machines in accordance with your business needs.
 
The VMFS helps to simplify the virtual machine administration and provisioning with a high performance cluster file system that is optimized for virtual machines. The system further features storage APIs, which helps to improve data protection, storage awareness and array integration. It also allows you to leverage multi-pathing capabilities from the third party vendors. The platform storage feature is further enhanced by flash read cache that virtualizes the server side flash by providing high performance read cache layer that helps reduce application latency.

Security
The platform uses bare-metal virtualization that offers direct interface between the hypervisor and your computer hardware eliminating the need for host operating system. This approach safeguards your system from OS related vulnerabilities. The bare-metal virtualization improves your system security by offering small hypervisor footprint that simplifies your systems deployment, maintenance and patching, which reduces the vulnerability by providing a smaller attack surface. The system also does not allow unauthorized software installation, which safeguards your data and application from attack.

Other security features that have been incorporated to the system include host firewall that protects the host management interface with a configurable but stateless firewall. The in-built APIs eliminate the need for third party software use, which can be used to attack the system. The system also features improved auditing and logging that offers all your activity under the logged-in user’s account allowing you to monitor and audit all activities. The platform also uses vShield Endpoint to improve endpoint protection. The vShield Endpoint eliminates anti-virus storms resulting in improved consolidation ratios and performance. It also automates anti-malware and anti-virus deployment and monitoring for total security.