VMWare Cheatsheet

vCloud Director – built on top of vSphere, enables the consolidation of virtual infrastructure across multiple clusters, the encapsulation of application services as portable vApps, and deployment of those services on-demand

vCenter Server – centrally manages VMware vSphere environments

vSphere – combination of products below, based on licensing level

Compute

ESX – OS-based hypervisor

ESXi – bare-metal hypervisor

Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) – continuously monitors utilization across a resource pool and intelligently allocates available resources among virtual machines according to business needs

Distributed Power Management (DPM) – continuously optimizes power consumption in the datacenter, by dynamically powering on/off VMs

Storage

VMFS – Virtual Machine File System

Thin Provisioning – allows over-allocation of storage capacity for increased storage utilization

Storage I/O Control – enables a pre-programmed response to occur when access to a storage resource becomes contentious

Network

Distributed Switch – simplifies virtual machine networking by enabling you to set up virtual machine networking for your entire datacenter from a centralized interface

Network I/O Control – configure rules and policies to specify the business priority of each VM. When I/O congestion is detected, Network I/O Control dynamically allocates the available I/O resources to flow types according to your rules

Availability

vMotion – live migration

Storage vMotion – enables you to perform live migration of virtual machine disk files across heterogeneous storage arrays

High Availability – provides cost effective, automated restart within minutes for all applications in the event of hardware or operating system failures

Fault Tolerance – provides continuous availability for applications in the event of server failures, by creating a live shadow instance of a virtual machine that is in virtual lockstep with the primary instance

Data Recovery – protects against data loss in your virtual environment by enabling fast backups to disk and, more importantly, fast and complete recovery

Security

vShield Zones – simplifies application security by enforcing corporate security policies at the application level in a shared environment, while still maintaining trust and network segmentation of users and sensitive data

VMSafe – enables the use of security products that work in conjunction with the virtualization layer to provide higher levels of security to virtual machines than even physical servers

Scalability

DRS – see above

Hot Add – enables CPU and memory to be added to virtual machines when needed without disruption or downtime

Infrastructure & Operations Management

vCenter Operations – automate performance, capacity and configuration management. It collects and analyzes performance data, correlates abnormalities and identifies the root cause of building performance problems

Site Recovery Manager – leverages cost-efficient vSphere Replication or storage-based replication to provide: replication of applications to a secondary site, management of recovery and migration plans, non-disruptive testing, and fully automated site recovery and migration

CapacityIQ – Optimize utilization of existing hardware resources, Plan for potential business and service disruptions proactively by modeling the impact of an outage, failure or disaster, and Model the effect of one-time strategic business changes.

Configuration Manager – policy-driven automation detects deep system changes and identifies whether that change is within policy or whether it has created a compliance violation or security vulnerability

Orchestrator – provides out of the box workflows that can help administrators automate existing manual tasks.

Converter – formerly P2V

Lab Manager – Provide automated management of highly transient and highly cloned virtual environments

Business Management

Chargeback – automate chargeback with VM consumption data from vCenter or vCloud Director

Service Manager – automates IT Service Management processes in enterprise organizations

Licensing Matrix

Standard	Enterprise	Enterprise Plus
Overview	Server consolidation and no planned downtime	Powerful & efficient resource management	Policy-based datacenter automation
Processor Entitlement	Per 1 CPU	Per 1 CPU	Per 1 CPU
vRAM Entitlement	32GB	64GB	96GB
vCPU Entitlement	8-way	8-way	32-way
Thin Provisioning	X	X	X
Update Manager	X	X	X
Data Recovery	X	X	X
High Availability	X	X	X
vMotion	X	X	X
Storage APIs for Data Protection	X	X	X
Virtual Serial Port Concentrator	X	X
Hot Add	X	X
vShield Zones	X	X
Fault Tolerance	X	X
Storage APIs for Array Integration	X	X
Storage APIs for Multipathing	X	X
Storage vMotion	X	X
Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS), Distributed Power Management (DPM)	X	X
Storage I/O Control	X
Network I/O Control	X
Distributed Switch	X
Host Profiles	X
Auto Deploy	X
Storage DRS	X
Profile-Driven Storage	X