First Look At VMware's vSphere "Cloud OS"

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Paul Venezia takes VMware's purported 'cloud OS,' vSphere 4, for a test drive. The bottom line: 'VMware vSphere 4.0 touches on almost every aspect of managing a virtual infrastructure, from ESX host provisioning to virtual network management to backup and recovery of virtual machines. Time will tell whether these features are as solid as they need to be in this release, but their presence is a substantial step forward for virtual environments.' Among the features Venezia finds particularly worthwhile is vSphere's Fault Tolerance: 'In a nutshell, this allows you to run the same VM in tandem across two hardware nodes, but with only one instance actually visible to the network. You can think of it as OS-agnostic clustering. Should a hardware failure take out the primary instance, the secondary instance will assume normal operations instantly, without requiring a VMotion.'"

Re:Instantly?

[Anonymous Coward]

It actually is instant. I cannot elaborate as to how this works since I work at VMW, but there are videos of demos online, and I've seen it work. It's incredible. ---- these opinions are mine and not vmware's. i do not represent their opinions, etc....

Re:How does it detect a 'failure'?

[Mista2]

Several Brand new servers with VI3 installed 2 weeks ago, left to run to burn in, first production guests moved onto them on Friday, Saturday sees CPU voltage regulator in one go pop, dead server. It would have been nice to just have the the Exchange server keep on rocking until Monday when we could replace the hardware, but no, now I've spent my Saturday morning going into work and fixing it.
However thanks to VM, the HighAvailbility service did restart the guests automatically, but I did have to repair a damaged mailstore. 8(

Re:How does it detect a 'failure'?

[Thumper_SVX]

This is one reason I run Exchange 2007 with a clustered PHYSICAL mailbox server, and all the CAS and HT roles I run on virtual machines. I don't run database type apps on VMware for exactly these reasons... I am a big VMware supporter, but I also specify for our big apps that we use big SQL and Exchange clusters for HA... not VMware. Yes, it's a bit more expensive that way, but our Exchange cluster now hasn't been "down" in over a year, despite the fact that each node gets patched once a month and rebooted. My users love it :)