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VMware vSphere Hypervisor is a free, powerful and reliable hardware hypervisor for use in server and workstation virtualization tasks. The article discusses the installation and configuration of the VMware Hypervisor, the creation of a virtual machine, the installation of a guest operating system.

Free vSphere Hypervisor: Technical Requirements, Limitations and Compatibility

VMware vSphere Hypervisor can be installed on a server that meets the following technical requirements:

The VMware vSphere Hypervisor distribution file is small (311 MB) and contains only the most necessary drivers, mainly for brand name servers. But sometimes it is not possible to install a hypervisor on servers of well-known brands. Often, server manufacturers release their own hypervisor distributions with their own drivers.

You can check the compatibility of VMware vSphere Hypervisor with your server on the page:

List of hardware not supported in ESXi 6.7: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/52583

Consider the main limitations of the free vSphere Hypervisor compared to the full-fledged VMWare ESXi:

There is no official technical support for VMWare;
One VM can be allocated no more than 8 virtual processors / cores (vCPU) (by the way, the restrictions on vCPU for VM generation gen1 are 64);
The host cannot be connected to vCenter;
The vStorage API is not available (it will not be possible to set up a normal backup, the same Veeam will not be able to pick up the VM from the host);
Maximum 2 physical processors (sockets) in the server (there are no restrictions on the number of cores);
All APIs are available in read-only mode (i.e. you won't be able to change any of the server or VM settings through the same ).

However, the free response of Sphere Hypervisor allows you to use all the cores and RAM of a physical server without restrictions. There are no limits on total RAM, processors, cores, or host or VM uptime. PCI VMDirectPath/USB redirection works.

How to download and install the free VMware vSphere Hypervisor?

We download the current version of the VMware Hypervisor vSphere 6.7 hypervisor. To do this, you need to log in to your VMWare account or create a new one.

If you are creating a new VMWare account, then after filling out the registration form, you need to wait for an email to confirm your account. Follow the link in the email and enter your password.

At the next stage, you receive a license key for the free version of the hypervisor and a link to download VMware vSphere Hypervisor. Be sure to save the key.

An iso image is downloaded, which can be burned to a USB flash drive, CD / DVD disk. Now you can install the hypervisor on the server (workstation or virtual machine).

Installation is very simple. Select “ ESXi-6.7.0-2019xxx-standard installer”.

Specify the drive on which the system will be installed. In this example, one 40 GB disk is available.

Select a keyboard layout.

Enter and confirm the root password (at least 7 characters).

After installation, a warning appears that the hypervisor without license key will run for 60 days.

Restart your computer.

The VMware vSphere hypervisor is installed. If your server is connected to a network with a DHCP server through at least one network interface, it will automatically receive an IP address, which you will see in the hypervisor console (it is called DCUI). This IP address is used to control the hypervisor from the web interface.

Configuring VMware ESXi in the Console

To manage Hypervisor settings on the DCUI screen, click F2, enter the username (by default, root) and the password set during the installation process.

A graphical console will open for initial configuration of the hypervisor.

Here you can set the following options:

The initial setup of VMware vSphere Hypervisor is complete. You can connect via the web interface.

VMware ESXi Web Based Management, Free License Installation

To connect to the vSphere Hypervisor via the Web interface, enter the server IP address assigned during the initial configuration of the hypervisor into the address bar of the browser. Then login (root) and password.

Please note that a server without a license will run for 60 days.

Activate the license received during registration “Manage” -> “Licensing” -> “Assign License”.

If you do not activate the license, after 60 days all running VMs will continue to work, but you will not be able to turn on new VMs or reboot existing VMs.

An Expires: Never license is activated for the hypervisor with an unlimited amount of RAM for virtual machines. You can allocate up to 8 virtual vCPUs (Up to 8-way virtual SMP) to each virtual machine.

“Manage” -> “System” -> “Time&date” -> “Edit settings”

VMWare ESXi Virtual Switch

Virtual switch(vSphere Switch or vSwitch) is a virtual device that transfers data between virtual machines inside the server and transfers data outside through the physical NIC. There are two types of virtual switches:

Standard Switches- a simple virtual switch, logically located inside a physical server.
Distributed Switches- distributed virtual switch, can be extended to several physical servers (not available in the free version of VMWare Hypervisor, and in the paid version it is available only in the Enterprise Plus edition ) .

After installing and starting the hypervisor, there is already one virtual switch vSwitch0, which includes one physical vmnic0 adapter and two groups of ports - a service (Management Network) for managing the hypervisor and a data network (VM Network). The vmk0 hypervisor management interface (vmkernel port) is included in the Management Network group.

In most cases, on a standalone hypervisor, one virtual switch will be enough for you. Port groups need to be created if you want to isolate virtual machines from each other, use different VLAN settings for a port group.

You do not need to make changes to the Management Network or vmkernel port unless absolutely necessary, otherwise you may lose access to your hypervisor management interface. If you have lost access to the hypervisor, you can reset network settings using the Network Restore Options menu in the DCUI console.

Creating a Virtual Machine in VMWare Hypervisor

In the Web interface, select “Virtual Machines” -> “Create / Register VM” -> “Create a new virtual machine”.

Assign a name to the virtual machine. Select the type and version of the guest operating system. Check the "Windows Virtualization Based Security" checkbox if you want to make hardware virtualization, IOMMU, EFI and Secure Boot available to the guest OS.

Select a datastore for the configuration files for the virtual machine and all of its virtual disks.

If the free space on the selected disk is less than its size, you will receive a message that you need to increase the size of the datastore.

At this step, all parameters of the virtual machine are configured: the number of CPUs, the amount of RAM, size and location hard drive, network adapters, CD/DVD drives, etc. To access the network in a VM, it is enough to place its adapter in the VM Network port group on the vSwitch0 switch (if you have not reconfigured anything).

All these parameters, if necessary, can then be changed when the virtual machine is turned off.

The next screen will ask you to check all the settings of the virtual machine and confirm them.

Installing a guest OS in a virtual machine

To install a guest OS on a virtual machine, you need to download the distribution iso image with the distribution of the desired OS to the local storage. From the Navigation menu, select Storage and press .

Create a directory for downloading distributions.

Select the created directory, click Upload in the upper left corner, select iso - the image of the bootable OS and wait for the download to complete.

Select the installed virtual machine and click “Actions” -> “Edit Settings”

Change the settings of the CD-DVD drive, as in the screenshot below. In CD / DVD Media, select the downloaded iso image of the operating system.

Then just turn on the virtual machine, the VM tries to boot from the ISO image, and the installation of the guest OS begins from the virtual CD / DVD, to which the iso image is linked.

After the installation of the guest OS is complete, you can use it as usual.

I hope this short overview article on the features of using the free VMWare vSphere Hypervisor will be useful to you.

Hypervisors (virtualization technologies) have existed for more than 30 years and during this time have managed to become one of the main "cogs" in the cloud ecosystem. Many companies looking for virtualization solutions choose two popular hypervisors - VMware and KVM. Let's find out which one is better. But first, a little theory.

What is a hypervisor?

A hypervisor is a program that separates the operating system from the hardware. Hypervisors virtualize server resources (processor, memory, disk, network interfaces, etc.), allowing them to be used as their own, and create several separate virtual machines based on one server. Each created virtual machine is isolated from its neighbors so as not to affect the work of others. Virtualization support is required for the hypervisor to work: for Intel processors on an Intel VT processor, and for AMD processors on AMD-V.

Hypervisors are divided into two types: the first work directly with the server, and the user's operating system runs on top of the hypervisor. These hypervisors can provide server management functionality to some users, and most enterprises use these hypervisors.

Hypervisors of the second type, also known as hosted hypervisors (Hosted Hypervisor), work with the operating system installed on the server. And operating systems for new users are built on top of the hypervisor.

Desktop hypervisors such as Oracle VirtualBox or VMware Workstation are type 2 hypervisors, while VMware and KVM are type 1. VMware and KVM are installed directly on the server and do not require any operating system to be installed.

VMware vSphere

Before buying VMware vSphere, you can try to work in a trial version (60 days), after which you need to buy a license, or put up with the limitations of the free version.

The free version, called VMware Free vSphere Hypervisor, has no CPU and memory limits per host, but a number of others:

The product API is read-only;
a virtual machine cannot have more than 8 cores;
it cannot be used with Veeam to create backups;
connection to vCenter Server is not supported;
high availability is not supported, as are VM Host Live Migration and VM Storage Live Migration technologies.

The product from VMware differs from analogues by supporting a large number of operating systems- Windows, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Netware, MacOS and more.

Installing a VMware distribution on a server is very simple: just boot from a CD, flash drive, or via PXE. In addition, scripts are supported to automate the installation process. software, configuring the network and connecting to vCenter Server.

It is also important to have a special converter VMware vCenter Converter, which allows you to use MS Virtual Server, Virtual PC, Hyper-V images in ESXi, as well as physical servers and disk partition images created by programs such as Acronis true image, Norton Ghost and others.

VMware vSphere has built-in integration with Microsoft Active Directory, which means that users in a private or hybrid cloud can be authenticated using Microsoft Domain Services. Flexible resource allocation allows you to use hot-add CPU, RAM and hard disk (including changing the size of the current hard disk without rebooting).

VMware Fault Tolerate is a VMware technology designed to protect virtual machines using continuous availability clusters. If the host (ESXi server) with the primary (Primary) working copy of the virtual machine fails, the protected virtual machine will instantly switch to the "secondary" (Secondary) or "shadow" copy running on another ESXi server. For machines protected by VMware Fault Tolerance, there is a constant (real-time) copying of the entire state of memory and processor instructions from the main copy to the "shadow". If the primary ESXi host fails, users will not even notice the failover process to the second host. This is where Fault Tolerance differs from High Availability. In High Availability, if a physical server fails, the virtual machines will be restarted on other nodes, and while the operating systems are rebooting, users will not be able to access the virtual servers.

In addition to VMware Foult Tolerate, the VMware vCloud Suite Enterprise license provides high availability, fault tolerance, and disaster recovery with vSphere HA, vMotion, Storage vMotion, and vCenter Site Recovery Manager features.

To reduce scheduled service interruptions to servers or storage systems (SAN), vMotion and Storage vMotion online migrate virtual machines and their disks without stopping applications and users. The vSphere Replication feature supports various vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) replication options to protect against major disasters. SRM provides centralized disaster recovery planning, automatic Failover and Failback from a failover site or vCloud, and non-disruptive disaster recovery testing.

The features of this hypervisor include selectivity to hardware - before installation, you must carefully check the existing equipment for compatibility with desired version ESXi. For this, the VMware website has a special .

Licensing of VMware products has its own peculiarities. Additional confusion is added by periodic changes (from version to version of vSphere) in the licensing policy of VMware. There are a few things to consider before purchasing VMware vSpere licenses:

Hypervisor licensing is based on the number of physical processors (CPUs). Each server CPU requires a separate vSphere license (cores are not physical processors and do not count towards licensing);
the available functionality of the ESXi server is determined by the vSphere license installed on it. A detailed guide to licenses is available at;
for each vShpere license purchased, you must purchase a service support package (at least for a year);
VMware does not impose limits on the amount of memory (RAM) installed on a server and on the number of running virtual machines.

You can manage multiple hosts with ESXi hypervisors, storage systems and network equipment using another VMware product - Vcenter Server. vSphere client plugins provided by VMware partners give IT administrators the ability to manage third-party elements in the data center directly from this console. Therefore, vCenter users can backup, protect data, manage servers, networks, and security directly from the vCenter interface. In the same console, you can set up triggers that will notify you of problems that have arisen, and get data on the operation of the entire infrastructure in the form of graphs or tables.

KVM

KVM is an easy-to-use, lightweight, low-resource, and fairly functional hypervisor. It allows you to deploy a virtualization platform in the shortest possible time and organize virtualization under the control of the Linux operating system. During operation, KMV accesses the operating system kernel through a special module (KVM-Intel or KVM-AMD). Initially, KVM only supported x86 processors, but modern versions of KVM support a wide variety of processors and guest operating systems, including Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows, and others. By the way, all Wiki resources (MediaWiki, Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikidata , Wikiversity) use this particular hypervisor.

Because guest operating systems interact with a hypervisor that is integrated into the Linux kernel, guest operating systems have the ability to access hardware directly without the need to change the guest operating system. Due to this, there is almost no slowdown in the guest operating system.

KVM allows virtual machines to use unmodified QEMU, VMware and other images containing operating systems. Each virtual machine has its own virtual hardware: network cards, disk, video card and other hardware.

Thanks to the support of unmodified VMware images, a physical server can be easily virtualized using the same VMware vServer Converter utility, and then transferred to the hypervisor.

Installing KVM on a Linux operating system involves installing the KVM package and the Libvirt virtualization library, as well as carefully setting up the virtualization environment. Depending on the operating system used on the host, you need to configure a bridge or a connection to a VNC console through which the virtual machines will communicate with the host.

Administering KVM is more difficult, since there is no transparent access to files, processes, consoles and network interfaces, you have to configure it yourself. Rebuilding VM parameters in KVM (CPU, RAM, HDD) is not very convenient and requires additional steps, including rebooting the OS.

The project itself does not offer convenient graphical tools for managing virtual machines, only the Virsh utility that implements all the necessary functions. For convenient management of virtual machines, you can additionally install the Virt-Manager package.

KVM does not have built-in tools like Fault Tolerate for VMware, so the only way to create a high availability cluster is to use network replication using DRDB. The DRBD cluster only supports two nodes, and the nodes are synchronized without encryption. That is, for a more secure connection, you must use a VPN connection.

In addition, to build a high-availability cluster, you will need the Heartbeat program, which allows you to exchange service messages about your state between nodes in the cluster, and Pacemaker, a cluster resource manager.

The KVM hypervisor is distributed as an open source product, and for corporate users there is a commercial Red Hat Virtualization (RHEL) solution based on KVM and the oVirt virtual infrastructure management platform.

The undoubted advantage of this hypervisor is that it can run on any server. The hypervisor is quite unpretentious in terms of resources, which makes it easy to use it for testing tasks.

Please note that KVM does not have a helpdesk. If something does not work out, you can count on the forums and the help of the community. Or switch to RHEL.

So what to choose?

Both hypervisors are mature, reliable, high-performance virtualization systems, each with its own characteristics to consider when choosing.

KVM is usually more scalable than VMware, primarily because vSphere has some limitations on the servers it can manage. In addition, VMware has added a large number of Storage Area Networks (SANs) to support multiple vendors. This feature means VMware has more storage options than KVM, but it also makes it harder to support VMware storage when expanding.

KVM is usually the most popular hypervisor for companies looking to reduce implementation costs and less interested in enterprise-grade features.

Studies have shown that KVM's total cost of ownership is typically 39 percent lower than that of VMware, although the actual total cost of ownership depends on specific factors such as operational parameters and site workload.

Tight integration with the operating system on the host is one of the most common reasons developers choose KVM. Especially those who use Linux. The inclusion of KVM in many Linux distributions also makes it a convenient choice for developers.

Cloud providers offering IaaS services to their customers usually choose an infrastructure built on VMware products. Solutions based on VMware Sphere contain all the important enterprise features for high and continuous availability, provide support for more guest operating systems and have the ability to interface the customer's infrastructure with cloud services.

The term "virtualization" has become very fashionable lately. The concept of "virtual machine" has ceased to be something exotic and distant. Many organizations, one way or another connected with information technology, have already learned how to use virtual machines in their daily activities to increase the efficiency of their IT infrastructure. The concept of virtualization is now used everywhere and, sometimes, in different contexts: virtualization of storage systems, operating systems, applications. If various aspects of virtualization of hardware resources have been known to specialists for a long time, then the virtualization of operating systems has begun to gain momentum only in the last few years, but at a rapid pace.

So what is virtualization and virtual machines in relation to operating systems? By itself, the term virtualization means the presentation of an object in a user-friendly form, while all implementation details are hidden, and the object itself has the usual interfaces for interacting with the external environment in relation to it. When talking about the virtualization of operating systems, first of all, they mean the creation of virtual machines - some abstractions that contain their own virtual hardware and software environment that allows you to install and run several instances of operating systems simultaneously on one physical platform. What is it for? First of all, in order to separate the representation of the operating system from the hardware and place several working virtual servers on one physical one with the ability to quickly migrate and restore operating environments. This approach also provides maximum flexibility in terms of server deployment, maintenance, and management.

Most CIOs of large organizations, if not planning partial or full virtualization of their IT infrastructure, are at least seriously thinking about it. In the long term, virtualization projects seem very tempting: increasing the flexibility of the IT infrastructure, increasing the reliability and ensuring high availability of servers, saving on hardware - all these and many other factors attract the heads of IT departments of companies. Nevertheless, many do not realize how much effort it will cost to migrate a physical infrastructure to a virtual one - after all, there are only a few competent specialists in this area now, and the acquisition and deployment of powerful commercial virtualization platforms requires considerable costs. This article will discuss two popular platforms for server virtualization - the free VMware Server and the commercial VMware ESX Server.

Why VMware?

VMware is one of the early players in the emerging virtualization platform market. In 1998, VMware patented its software virtualization techniques and since then has released many effective and professional products for virtualization of various levels: from VMware Workstation aimed at the end user (consumer) to VMware ESX Server designed to host the virtual infrastructure of medium and large enterprises. In a very extensive list of VMware products, you can find many tools to increase the efficiency of the virtualization process, manage virtual servers, and migrate from physical to virtual platforms. In Russia, VMware products are especially popular, since virtualization is still gaining momentum here, and platforms from other vendors, which are not so well known to us, are very “raw” and have much less functionality than VMware counterparts. In addition, VMware virtualization products almost always outperform the competition in a variety of performance tests. And if they talk about virtualization of operating rooms Windows systems- then it is almost certainly VMware products. Meanwhile, among virtualization platforms, VMware has plenty to choose from:

VMware Workstation- a platform focused on Desktop-users and intended for use by software developers, as well as professionals in the field of IT,
VMware Player- a free "player" of virtual machines, designed to run ready-made templates of virtual machines that perform a specific task,
VMware Server, formerly called VMware GSX Server, aimed at use in the infrastructure of small enterprises to maintain virtual servers
VMware Ace- a product for creating virtual machines protected by security policies,
VMware ESX Server- a powerful virtualization platform for medium and large businesses, focused primarily on maintaining a holistic and scalable IT infrastructure,
VMware Virtual Center- a powerful tool for managing virtualization platforms VMware ESX Server and VMware Server, which has extensive capabilities for server consolidation, configuration and management.
VMware Fusion is a desktop virtualization product for the Mac platform from Apple.

VMware's formal competitors in terms of server virtualization are Microsoft, Virtual Iron, XenSource, and SWsoft. However, SWsoft's product has a rather narrow scope (hosting), and the developments of other vendors currently look much weaker compared to VMware products.

When to implement virtual infrastructure in a company

First of all, it is necessary to clearly define the goals for which virtualization platforms will be implemented. Then, it is necessary to determine the criteria by which the effectiveness of the implementation of the virtual infrastructure will be evaluated. In addition to purely financial criteria (reduced hardware costs, savings in maintenance), you must also consider improving infrastructure reliability, scalability, flexibility, resiliency, reduced deployment time, downtime, disaster recovery, centralization of management and ensuring high availability. Of course, all these criteria can be expressed in monetary terms, depending on the type and specifics of the environment to be virtualized.

7 reasons to implement server virtualization

Increasing hardware utilization
According to statistics, most servers are loaded by 15-20 percent when performing daily tasks. The use of several virtual servers on one physical one will increase it up to 80 percent, while providing significant savings on the purchase of hardware.
Reduce hardware replacement costs
Since virtual servers are decoupled from specific hardware, updating the fleet of physical servers does not require re-installation and configuration of the software. The virtual machine can simply be copied to another server.
Increasing the flexibility of using virtual servers
If you need to use several servers (for example, for testing and working in production) with a changing load, virtual servers are best solution, as they can be painlessly ported to other platforms when the physical server is experiencing increased loads.
Ensuring high availability
Backing up virtual machines and restoring them from backups takes much less time and is a simpler procedure. Also, in case of equipment failure, the backup copy of the virtual server can be immediately launched on another physical server.
Increasing the manageability of the server infrastructure
There are many virtual infrastructure management products that allow you to centrally manage virtual servers and provide load balancing and live migration.
Savings on service personnel
Simplifying the management of virtual servers in the future entails savings on specialists serving the company's infrastructure. If two people can do what four people can do with virtual server management tools, why do you need two extra people making at least $15,000 a year? Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that a lot of money is also needed to train qualified personnel in the field of virtualization.
Saving on electricity
For small companies, this factor, of course, does not really matter, but for large data centers, where the cost of maintaining a large fleet of servers includes electricity costs (power, cooling systems), this moment is of considerable importance. The concentration of several virtual servers on one physical will reduce these costs.

When not to implement infrastructure in a company

Despite all the advantages, server virtualization also has some limitations of its application. When planning a virtual infrastructure, consider the following factors:

Servers have a continuous workload of over 60 percent
Such servers are not good candidates for virtualization, because when it is migrated to a virtual machine and placed with other virtual servers, it may run out of resources.
The server uses additional hardware that cannot be virtualized
Everything is clear here: in the case when the server uses hardware that is not supported by virtualization platform vendors, it makes no sense to virtualize such a server.
The cost of acquiring and implementing a virtualization platform is too high
In medium and small organizations, the server infrastructure is not that big, and so are the hardware and maintenance costs. In such a case, you need to be careful about the virtualization procedure, since the purchase of a commercial platform may not be justified.
Lack of qualified specialists
In many cases, the process of migrating from physical hardware to virtual machines and further deploying a virtualization platform requires good skills from the people who carry them out. This is especially required when deploying "Bare metal" class platforms (bare metal). If you're not sure that your people have the knowledge to do so, don't start a virtualization project.

VMware Server is a free and powerful virtualization platform for small businesses

The free product VMware Server is a fairly powerful virtualization platform that can be run on servers running Windows and Linux host operating systems. The main purpose of VMware Server is to support small and medium-sized virtual infrastructures of small enterprises. Due to the small complexity of its development and installation, VMware Server can be deployed in the shortest possible time, both on the servers of organizations and on computers of home users.

Previously, this product was distributed under a commercial license and was called VMware GSX Server 3, however, with the growth of opportunities and sales of the powerful VMware ESX Server virtualization platform, VMware did not see any prospects in sales of the VMware Server platform, eventually making the product free. It is worth noting that for this product, VMware relies primarily on sales revenue from Virtual Center for VMware Server, a powerful virtual infrastructure management tool based on VMware Server that provides rich virtual machine interaction and virtual server consolidation capabilities.

Here are the main use cases for the VMware Server product:

support for several virtual servers on one physical in the company's production
support for multiple virtual servers for "bundled" testing in the host's virtual network during software development and support
launching ready-to-use virtual machines (Virtual Appliances) that perform a specific server function
ensuring high availability of virtual servers (virtual machines can be easily transferred between physical servers)
creation of backup copies of virtual servers that are easy to restore by obtaining snapshots of the current state of the system (“snapshots”).

VMware Server has a wide range of options for working with virtual machines, including:

Support for any standard x86 architecture
VMware Server does not have specific requirements for physical server components - unlike VMware ESX Server, which imposes very specific restrictions on server hardware. Multi-core processors are also supported.
Support for bidirectional virtual SMP (symmetric multi-processing)
If the architecture of the physical server allows, virtual machines created in VMware Server can contain two virtual processors, which positively affects the performance of guest systems.
Support for a large number of host and guest operating systems, a complete list of which is always available on the VMware website
The number of host operating systems on which VMware Server can be installed is, of course, less than the number of supported guest systems. Meanwhile, almost any known operating system can be installed as a guest. Even if it is not in the list of supported, this does not mean that it cannot be installed.
Support for 64-bit host and guest operating systems
As host 64-bit systems, 64-bit operating systems of the family Windows Server 2003, as well as 64-bit versions of Linux systems: Red Hat, SUSE, Mandriva and Ubuntu. The list of supported guest OSes has also been supplemented with 64-bit ones. Windows versions Vista, Sun Solaris and FreeBSD.
Support for IntelVT (Intel Virtualization Technology)
VMware Server experimentally supports Intel's hardware virtualization technology and allows it to be used to support virtual machines. It is worth noting that according to the research of VMware engineers, hardware virtualization is still slower than software virtualization, so it is not recommended to enable support for software virtualization in order to improve performance.

Acquaintance with VMware Server begins with the virtual machine management console window:

IN working area main window of the program, you can create a virtual machine, add an existing one, switch the console to another physical host (manage the virtual server remotely), and configure the host settings.

Creating a virtual machine in VMware Server is a simple and intuitive process and takes just a few steps of the virtual machine creation wizard:

select the guest system from the list, which will be installed as a guest
select the name and location of the virtual machine files
select the type of network interaction between the virtual machine, host OS, other virtual machines and external network
enter the size of the virtual disk and click Finish.

After that, if the distribution kit of the installed guest system is on a CD or DVD, just insert it into the drive and press the "Power on" button on the toolbar. If you have the distribution kit of the operating system in the form of an ISO image, select the menu item VM-> Settings, go to the CD-ROM element, where we indicate the path to the ISO image, click "OK" and "Power On".

The process of installing a guest system in VMware Server is quite simple and does not require a separate description. However, when installing guest OSes, be sure to consider the following points:

Allocate enough resources to the planned virtual server to perform its functions, but remember that it is always more difficult to increase the number of allocated resources than to reduce it.
When choosing the type of network interaction for a virtual server, consider security issues, and if the virtual server only needs interaction only in the internal virtual network of the host, do not install Bridged Networking.
If you are not the only one who has access to the virtual server management console, you can make your virtual machine private by checking the VM->Settings->Options->Permissions checkbox.
Don't forget to install VMware Tools in your guest systems, as installing these add-ons greatly improves guest experience and performance.
Try to keep the ratio: no more than 4 virtual machines per physical processor, since more of them will significantly affect the performance of virtual servers.

When maintaining a virtual infrastructure based on VMware Server, you must carefully monitor the load on the server's hardware resources. If any virtual machine does not have enough resources, you need to think about moving it to another server. If you plan to manage a large number of virtual servers, you should consider purchasing the VMware Virtual Center product, which allows you to centrally control many hosts on which VMware Server is installed, group them into clusters, and monitor the load of hosts by virtual machines. To determine the amount of resources to allocate to virtual servers, use the performance counters inside the guest systems. Try to use only virtual SCSI disks because virtual IDEs are slower.

If you need to access the virtual server console from an external network, you can set up a Web client for VMware Server that is integrated with Microsoft IIS. This feature will allow you to control virtual servers over the Internet using a secure SSL (Secure Socket Layer) connection.

VMware Server Specifications

Opportunities	VMware Server 1.0
Ability to run as a service	Yes
Starting virtual machines at the start of the host operating system	Yes
Local management	Thick client, command line
Multiple user access	Yes
Programming Interfaces (APIs)	Yes (C/COM/Perl)
Remote use of the product	Yes (web console)
Remote use of virtual machines	fat client
Managing multiple installations	Not
VM/Core Ratio	2-4
Support for hardware virtualization	Intel VT (Experimental)
Generation of virtual hardware	5
Support for virtual processors inside a virtual machine (VMware Virtual SMP technology)	2 (Experimental)
The maximum amount of RAM allocated for a virtual machine	Up to 3.4 GB
The maximum amount of RAM allocated for all virtual machines	Up to 64 GB
IDE virtual controllers/ disks per virtual machine	1/4
SCSI virtual controllers/disks per virtual machine	4/60
Maximum virtual disk size	Up to 950 GB
Maximum number of virtual network interfaces	4
virtual switches	9
Getting snapshots through the "thick" client	Yes
Getting snapshots via command line	Not
Multiple Snapshots	Not
Cloning virtual machines	Not
Virtual machine groups (Teams)	Not
Debugging virtual machines	Yes
Shared folders service	Not
Drag&Drop support Host Virtual machine	Not
Unsupported host OS	Windows XP Professional (32/64bit) Windows XP Home Windows 2000 Professional Red Hat Linux 7.0 Red Hat Linux 7.1

Only on operating systems that support extended memory or have PAE enabled.
Available when using VMware Virtual Center.

For the VMware Server product, there are many different commercial and free utilities for managing virtual machines and disks, monitoring performance and maintenance. However, if you're going to take full advantage of VMware Server's capabilities, you should take a closer look at VMware Virtual Center for VMware Server.

VMware ESX Server is an enterprise-class virtualization platform and enterprise virtual infrastructure builder

Among the many virtualization solutions offered by VMware, VMware ESX Server occupies a special place. As the company's flagship development, VMware ESX Server is the basis for building large virtual infrastructures into which other VMware products are integrated.

VMware ESX Server is a "Bare Metal" virtualization platform and is installed on a "clean" server that does not have an operating system and other software. VMware ESX Server is based on the Red Hat Linux operating system, in which VMware engineers have made significant changes, adding many features to support virtualization. This implementation of this platform allows the most efficient use of server hardware resources and provides the best interaction between guest systems and hardware.

VMware ESX Server has many benefits and is the core of a large enterprise virtual infrastructure that requires multiple virtual servers to be maintained, consolidated, highly available, and migrate virtual machines between physical servers. ESX Server is a true concept of building an enterprise IT infrastructure using virtual machines.

In addition to the ESX server, the virtual infrastructure of the enterprise also contains components such as SANs (Storage Area Networks), storage systems (Storages), high-speed connections (Fibre Channel) and virtual networks (VLANs). A virtual infrastructure based on VMware ESX Server allows you to centrally manage all these resources and ensure the smooth operation of virtual servers. The main components of the virtual infrastructure are:

Own ESX Server.
VMware VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) file system optimized for virtual machine performance and high availability.
VMware SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing)- a technology that allows virtual machines to use all the processors of the host, while having several virtual processors.
Virtual Infrastructure Client- a powerful tool for remote administration and configuration of VMware ESX Server, running on Windows workstations and having a friendly interface.
Virtual Center- a tool for centralized management of multiple ESX servers.
Virtual Infrastructure Web Access- the ability to manage virtual machines from an external network via a secure channel.
VMware VMotion- a technology that allows you to carry out a "live" migration of a running virtual server to another physical server, without the need to turn off the virtual machine and ensure its uninterrupted operation during migration.
VMware High Availability (HA)- the ability to automatically restart the necessary virtual machine mirrors on another server in the event of a hardware or software failure of a physical server.
VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)- a component that allows dynamic allocation of resources to virtual machines.
VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)- a simple and powerful tool for creating backup copies of virtual machines.
VMware Infrastructure SDK- a package for developing applications for virtual infrastructure by third-party developers.

When to Use a Virtual Infrastructure Based on VMware ESX Server

You have a clear idea of how many physical servers you will need to maintain your virtual server infrastructure. Keep in mind that you need to plan the migration of physical servers based on no more than 4-6 virtual machines per physical processor, with an average real load of migrated physical servers of 15%.
You have selected the appropriate VMware ESX Server edition and virtual infrastructure components, calculated the cost of deploying and maintaining them, and concluded that the implementation is worthwhile because the savings in hardware and maintenance cover these costs.
You have specialists who will not only competently conduct a virtualization project, but also administrators with sufficient knowledge to maintain and develop a virtual infrastructure every day.
You are ready to purchase the hardware required by VMware ESX Server. Be careful - the ESX server installation guide says what specific hardware is required to install it. At first glance, everything will seem quite expensive, but if you read the requirements carefully, it becomes clear that a fully functioning ESX Server for training purposes can be assembled for $900.

The procedure for installing VMware ESX Server is quite simple and does not require extensive knowledge from the user. If you followed VMware's recommendations and correctly selected the host server hardware, then installing the ESX server will take no more than an hour. After you install at least one ESX, you will immediately have a lot of questions and problems - this is the price for the opportunities that VMware ESX Server provides. Here are the main recommendations for the first steps after installing ESX:

To manage the ESX server and create the first virtual machines, use the VMware Infrastructure Client, which can be downloaded from: https://.
To transfer files to and from ESX, use either WinSCP (slow file transfer, encrypts traffic) or FastSCP (fast file transfer, but it is better not to use it from an external network, since traffic is not encrypted).
In order to allow the Root user to log in via SSH (Secure Shell), add the line "PermitRootLogon yes" to the "httpd.conf" file on ESX.
To manage disks, use the "vmkfs-tools" utilities, to monitor the performance of virtual machines - the "esxtop" command, to analyze error reports, use the "var/log/vmware/hostd.log" log.
Remember, free space on your ESX is always two types of partitions: the first is for the operating system of the ESX itself, the second is vmfs partitions for hosting virtual machines. To find out how much free space is left on both partitions, use the "vdf -h" command.

After you install VMware ESX Server, you will need a tool to migrate from physical to virtual (P2V - Physical to Virtual) servers. VMware offers VMware Converter for this purpose, but you can also use other vendors' solutions. You will constantly have questions - do not hesitate to contact the VMware forums, where its regular visitors will help you in a difficult situation. Ultimately, your ESX will have several virtual machines installed, representing a virtual infrastructure, which is shown in the figure made using the Veeam Reporter program:

The key concepts of virtual infrastructure are: physical adapter (NIC), virtual adapter (vNIC), virtual switch (vSwitch) and virtual network (Vlan). VMware ESX Server allows you to create up to four virtual network adapters for a virtual machine, each of which can be bound to a virtual network that is created in turn on virtual switches.

A virtual switch is an abstract multiport device that performs circuit switching between virtual networks and virtual network adapters of virtual machines.

A virtual network is an association of several virtual machines into a single network environment in which they interact with each other. If a virtual switch is connected to a physical network adapter, then virtual machines through it will be able to "see" the external, in relation to ESX, network.

In fact, everything is not as complicated as it seems: creating elements of a virtual infrastructure takes very little time and, once configured, such an infrastructure does not require further configuration when new virtual machines are introduced into it.

A little about Virtual Center for VMware ESX Server

As with VMware Server, the use of multiple hosts with VMware ESX Server in an enterprise's IT infrastructure creates the challenge of centrally managing and monitoring the performance of physical hosts. To solve these problems with VMware ESX Server platforms, as well as for VMware Server, the Virtual Center solution is used. His appearance shown in the figure:

Virtual Center allows you to monitor many hosts on which VMware ESX Server is installed, cluster them and control them using "alarms" - signals about various events. It should be noted that the capabilities of Virtual Center for VMware ESX Server are much greater than those of Virtual Center for VMware Server, which is primarily due to the fact that the VMware ESX Server product itself has much broader capabilities.

What to choose: VMware Server or VMware ESX Server?

From the above, it becomes clear that both products described in the article are aimed at maintaining a virtual server infrastructure and perform similar functions. However, there are significant differences between these two platforms. If a virtual infrastructure based on VMware Server can be built primarily from servers that perform day-to-day tasks in an organization that do not require high availability, speed and flexibility, then VMware ESX Server is a complete platform for supporting an enterprise's vital IT infrastructure in conditions of uninterrupted operation of virtual servers and their support in 24×7×365 mode.

Here are some examples of when to use a VMware Server-based infrastructure:

support and maintenance of internal servers of the organization,
performing tasks for testing individual applications,
simulation of small virtual networks in order to test working server links,
launching ready-to-use virtual machine templates that act as internal servers of the organization,
obtaining individual servers ready for rapid migration.

VMware ESX Server should be used for the following tasks:

streaming application testing in large software development organizations,
maintenance of external servers of the organization with a high degree of availability, flexibility and manageability,
modeling large virtual networks,
reducing the cost of equipment, maintenance and electricity in large organizations and data centers.

Thus, when implementing a virtual infrastructure in an organization, you need to carefully consider the definition of end goals. When deploying a free VMware Server, there will be no special problems with installation and maintenance, there will also be no costs for acquiring the platform itself, however, the organization may lose speed (since virtualization is performed on top of the host operating system), reliability and availability. The introduction of VMware ESX Server will result in great technical difficulties in deployment and maintenance in the absence of qualified specialists. In addition, investing in such a platform may not pay off for small and medium-sized organizations. However, as VMware's experience shows, for large organizations, the implementation of VMware ESX Server, in the long run, turns into serious cost savings.

Taking into account these points will allow you to competently plan the migration of physical servers of your IT infrastructure to virtual ones, while saving not only money, but also time, which, as you know, is also money.

Today I would like to tell you about products that used to be released by VMware, but for one reason or another were taken off the market and stopped developing. The list is far from complete and contains, for the most part, my opinion about the products based on the results of working with them.

VMware ESX Server

I'll start with perhaps the most significant product, thanks to which VMware has become a leader in the server virtualization market.

VMware ESX Server is the first type 1 hypervisor for Intel x86 processors. ESX wasn't the first server hypervisor, and it wasn't even the first VMware product. However, it was the first to implement features such as live migration of VMs (vMotion), high availability of VMs (High Availability), automatic balancing (Distributed Resource Scheduler), power management (Distributed Power Management) and much more.

By the way, have you ever wondered what the abbreviation ESX means? So, ESX is Elastic Sky X. Which once again proves that back in 2002, VMware developed its products with an eye on cloud computing...

ESX was built on the basis of a monolithic architecture, all drivers, network and I / O subsystem worked at the hypervisor level. However, to manage the hypervirus, a small service VM was installed on each host - Service Console based on a modified Red Hat Linux distribution. On the one hand, this imposed a number of restrictions - the service VM ate off part of the host's computing resources, its disks, like any other VM, needed to be placed on VMFS storage, and each host needed at least two IP addresses, one for the VMKernel interface , the second one is for the Service Console. On the other hand, the Service Console provided the ability to install third-party software (agents, plugins), which expanded the possibilities for monitoring and managing the hypervisor. The presence of the Service Console has given rise to a common misconception that the ESX hypervisor is a modified Linux "th.

It is worth mentioning that the first versions of ESX were installed and managed separately, however, starting with ESX 2.0, VMware VirtualCenter (now well known as vCenter Server) appeared to centrally manage multiple hosts. Then, in fact, Virtual Infrastructure appeared, which was a set of products for virtualization, consisting of the ESX hypervisor and VirtualCenter management software. By version 4.0, Virtual Infrastructure has been renamed to vSphere.

In 2008, an alternative hypervisor appeared - ESXi, which did not need the Service Console, was much smaller in size, but did not support much of what ESX could do (ESXi did not have a WEB interface, a built-in firewall, the ability to boot over SAN, integration with Active Directory, etc.). With each new version VMware has gradually increased the functionality of ESXi. VMware vSphere 4.1 was the latest release to include the ESX hypervisor. Starting with 5.0, VMware left only ESXi.

VMware GSX Server

For many years, VMware GSX Server was released in parallel with VMware ESX. Ground Storm X (this is how the abbreviation GSX stands for) was a type 2 hypervisor and was installed on top of server operating systems Microsoft Windows, RedHat or SUSE Linux. Using a type 2 hypervisor had its advantages. Firstly, GSX supported a much wider range of hardware and could even run on desktop hardware, unlike the "whimsical" ESX. Secondly, VMware GSX was extremely easy to install and configure, anyone who worked with VMware Workstation was able to handle GSX as well. Thirdly, GSX had a built-in NAT and DHCP server, which made it easy to set up a network for a VM.

Like its older brother, GSX supported centralized management through VirtualCenter.

Later, GSX was renamed to VMware Server, while gaining the ability to run 64-bit VMs, as well as to allocate several virtual processors to the VM. Released at the end of 2008, VMware Server 2.0 became free, acquired a full-fledged web interface and the ability to forward USB devices inside the VM, but lost support for VMware VirtualCenter.

By this time, ESX and ESXi hypervisors had taken over most of the server virtualization market. Output free versions VMware ESXi Free and Microsoft Hyper-V Server are the final nail in the coffin of VMware Server. VMware and Microsoft have abandoned their server OS hypervisors.

VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat

The product, designed to provide high availability of vCenter services and related services (DBMS, SSO, Update Manager), was developed not by VMware itself, but by a third-party company - Neverfail Group.

The protection mechanism was based on the idea of organizing a two-node cluster operating in active-passive mode. The passive node monitored the state of the main node, and if it was unavailable, it launched clustered services. The cluster did not require shared storage to operate. changes made on the active node are periodically replicated to the passive node. vCenter Heartbeat provided protection for both physical and virtual, and even mixed vCenter configurations, with one node being physical and the other being virtual.

Although for a while vCenter Heartbeat was the only way to protect vCenter not only from hardware failures, but also from software failures, the implementation was frankly lame. The complex procedure for installing and maintaining the cluster, as well as a lot of bugs, did their dirty work. As a result, starting with vSphere 5.5 U3 / vSphere 6.0, VMware abandoned vCenter Heartbeat and returned to the more familiar way of clustering using Microsoft Failover Cluster.

VMware vCenter Protect

For those of you who have worked with vSphere at least since version 4, you should know that at that time vCenter Update Manager supported the installation of updates not only for ESX / ESXi hypervisors, but also for guest operating systems and various software. However, since 5.0 this functionality has been removed from Update Manager, instead VMware began to offer a separate product - VMware vCenter Protect, which was acquired with Shavlik.

In addition to updating guest OSes, vCenter Protect made it possible to perform an inventory of software and hardware, run various scripts on a schedule, and scan for vulnerabilities.

But it didn't seem to be selling very well, and VMware's portfolio included vRealize Configuration Manager, acquired in 2010 from EMC, which handled patch management, inventory, and more. Therefore, in 2013 vCenter Protect was sold to LANDesk.

VMware Virtual Storage Appliance

The Virtual Storage Appliance is VMware's first foray into the software-defined storage market. VSA was intended for SMB and allowed the creation of a shared fault-tolerant storage system based on local disks installed in the server.

A dedicated VSA application was deployed on each ESXi host. VSA virtual disks were placed on VMFS storage created on volumes of the local RAID controller. Half of the disk space was intended for mirroring data from another VSA (a kind of network analogue of RAID 1) located on a neighboring host, half remained for useful data. Each app then presented its mirrored NFS storage back to all virtualization hosts. One installation supported 2 or 3 virtualization hosts, when using 2 hosts vCenter Server acted as an arbitrator and had to be deployed on a separate physical server or ESXi host that is not part of the VSA.

The functionality of VSA was very limited. So, for example, the first version of VSA only supported placement on VMFS volumes with RAID 1 or 10, which led to high data storage overheads (in fact, usable space was less than 1/4 of the volume of local disks), there was no support for VAAI, there was no support for caching or tearing.

All this, combined with a not too low price and low performance, did not allow VSA to force out the usual storage systems from the SMB segment. Therefore, shortly after the release of the first version of Virtual SAN in 2014, the product was withdrawn from sales.

VMware Virsto

Another victim of Virtual SAN, a product of the company of the same name, which VMware acquired in 2013. As far as I know, after the purchase, Virsto did not appear in the price lists, but was almost immediately multiplied by zero.

A promising development in the field of software-defined data storage, Virsto was a virtual application that acted as a storage virtualizer, i.e. storage resources were presented to uplines, and uplines, in turn, gave disk space to hosts using the NFS protocol. The heart of Virsto was VirstoFS - a specialized file system, which allows you to optimize write and read operations through the use of mechanisms similar to those that can be seen in NetApp FAS storage. Virsto could accumulate random write operations in a special log and then sequentially write data to the storage system, which had a positive effect on IOPS and latency. In addition, Virsto supported multi-level data storage (tearing) and optimized the work with snapshots by storing metadata in RAM about which data block is in which of the snapshots.

Despite the fact that the product never came out, the efforts of the developers were not in vain - in Virtual SAN 6.0, instead of VMFS-L, a new disk layout format based on VirstoFS and support for "advanced" snapshots appeared.

VMware Lab Manager

A product for automating the deployment and lifecycle management of VMs in test environments.

In fact, Lab Manager was a manager manager, deployed on top of an existing installation of VMware ESX / ESXi and vCenter and allowed organizing multi-user (multi-tenant) access to a common virtual infrastructure, allocating the necessary set of computing resources to users, automatically issuing VM IP addresses from pools, creating isolated networks for VM, specify the lease period for the VM.

With the growing popularity of the topic of cloud computing, VMware switched to another product - vCloud Director, gradually transferring all the accumulated chips from Lab Manager and closing it.

VMware ACE

I want to finish the review on a fairly rare beast - VMware ACE. Even before the advent of VDI in its classic form and the widespread adoption of BYOD, VMware offered customers software for centralized management of virtual workstations that could run on personal computers users - VMware ACE.

ACE worked in conjunction with VMware Workstation and Player client hypervisors and allowed VMs to be managed based on specified policies. With the help of policies, administrators could restrict the functionality of the VM (for example, disable USB device forwarding or control network access), force encryption of virtual disks, allow access to the VM only for authorized users, configure the VM lifetime after which the VM stops starting, etc. d. VMs, along with policies and the VMware Player hypervisor, could be exported as a ready-made Pocket ACE package and transferred to the user in any convenient way (on a CD, flash drive, or over the network). If necessary, the administrator could deploy an ACE Management Server on the network, to which client hypervisors connected and requested the current policy settings for the VM.

Despite the interesting functionality, the product was not widely used, and according to VMware did not meet all the requirements of the few customers that used it, so in 2011 it was withdrawn from sale. A few years later, ACE was replaced by VMware Horizon FLEX, which has its own mechanism for delivering VMs to user computers, as well as supporting the VMware Fusion Pro hypervisor for Apple MAC OS X.