vSphere

vSphere is a software product that virtualizes a company’s computing infrastructure. It combines several ESXi-hosts and is managed through a special application. The software is developed by VMware.

Features

It takes 1-2 hours for a customer to completely move their current infrastructure into the cloud. The vendor takes care of the maintenance and the customer gets a final solution.

Further scaling of computing resources or disk space is no problem. The customer indicates the required capacity to the provider and gets it within an hour.

The cloud infrastructure is provided to end users together with artificial intelligence which simplifies administration and configuration. Updating software, installing updates to operating systems, upgrading firmware on hardware platforms — all this goes under the control of the AI on behalf of the provider.

Reduced financial costs for hardware upgrades and support.

If one of the servers (storage or switch) fails, the service provider replaces it, without the end user being aware of it.

Adding a virtual storage, computing platform or switching equipment is done according to the hot-swap principle. That means that the end user does not stop the business processes to expand the current infrastructure.

vSphere is managed in specialized vCentre software which provides administrators with a single point of entry.

Licensing

The software is licensed by processor sockets or by physical virtualization hosts. Multiple editions are available for each option.

The small business sector uses the Essential or Essential Plus variants. The main difference between the two is the addition of vMotion technology, which transfers a virtual host to another physical site without shutting down the current one. The transfer speed is instantaneous, causing no load on processing power.

Essential gives the user the right to use 3 separate hypervisors with a single management point, and Plus also adds the HA Cluster (High Availability Cluster) option. The service restarts virtual machines on an inoperative cluster automatically. The number is limited to 32 hosts.

The next option is the vSphere Standart release. The edition differs from Essential Plus as it has an unlimited number of hosts in the HA Cluster service. There is no RDS technology, which is a load balancer.

The latest variants are Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. They include a full range of features, such as vDS virtual switch or vSAN virtual storage.

vSphere completely virtualizes the enterprise infrastructure and is delivered to the end user as a service. The customer receives the final product and only needs to set it up. A flexible licensing system reduces the financial cost of purchasing this service.