Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize Your Servers

Server virtualization isn’t just for big companies. Entry-level virtualization tools are free or low-cost, and there are many benefits to virtualization (including saving money). It’s not a question of “if” you should virtualize your servers;it’s a question of “when.” In this article, I outline five steps you should take to determine when to virtualize your servers. There are a number of server virtualization solutions available today. However, this article isn’t about which solution to choose. Many virtualization questions are “solution agnostic,” and the...
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VMware ESXi Design

The ESXi hypervisor shares many common elements with its older big brother ESX classic, but the main differentiator is that the Linux-based Service Console was stripped out. ESXi retains VMkernel and VMM components similar to ESX but has additional features built into the VMkernel; a new, much smaller management console; and other user-mode processes to replace the old Service Console OS functionality. ESXi was redesigned this way to allow VMware users to scale out through a hypervisor that is more akin to a hardware appliance. The...
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VMware ESXi vs ESX (difference)

The removal of the Service Console fundamentally changed what was possible with VMware’s hypervisor. ESXi has a smaller and less demanding footprint, which means the hypervisor consumes fewer host resources to perform essentially the same functions. ESXi also uses significantly less disk space, whether local disk or boot-from-SAN space. The Service Console of ESX hosts effectively ran as a single vCPU guest, which meant all of its processes ran serially. With ESXi, those functions were moved to the VMkernel, meaning...
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VMware vSphere Hypervisor

The term VMware vSphere hypervisor is actually a marketing term to specifi cally refer to the standalone version of ESXi that can be downloaded for free from the VMware website. It’s a restricted version of the hypervisor that can’t be managed by a vCenter instance. Remote connections via APIs are read-only, which limits third-party software such as backup and cloning tools, and there is a hard limit of 32 GB of physical memory for the host. It’s offered as a direct response to other free...
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