31. What is VMware
VCB?
VMware
Consolidated Backup (or VCB) is a group of Windows command line utilities,
installed on a Windows system, that has SAN connectivity to the ESX Server VMFS
file system. With VCB, you can perform file level
or
image level backups and restores of the VM guests, back to the VCB server. From
there, you will have to find a way to get those VCB backup files off of the VCB
server and integrated into your normal backup process. Many backup vendors
integrate with VCB to make that task easier. Contrary to what it sounds like
VCB IS NOT a traditional backup application because it doesn’t do anything to
get the data off the system and onto external media nor does it have a GUI
interface.
32.
What is Virtual Center?
Both
VMware Virtual Center and Microsoft System Center are centralized management
applications for their respective virtualization platform.
Virtual
Center is a required piece of many of the advanced VMware ESX Server features
but it must be purchased separately. Virtual Center runs on a Windows server
and it could use SQL as a backend.
33.
What is System Center Virtual Machine Manager?
Microsoft
System Center is Microsoft’s centralized management platform for just about
every Microsoft enterprise function (“from data center to desktop”, as
Microsoft says).
More
specifically, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager is the
centralized management platform for virtualization. Microsoft calls it their
“comprehensive virtualization management tool”. It can perform virtual machine
monitoring, configuration, provisioning, and administration. The latest
version, VMM 2008, can manage Microsoft Hyper-V, Virtual Server 2005, and
VMware ESX Server platforms.
34.What
is a partition?
In
virtualization terminology, a partition is what is managed by a hypervisor.
That partition could have a virtual guest operating system inside of it, or the
partition could be empty.
35.
What are: virtual processor, virtual RAM, virtual NIC, & virtual disk?
From
working with servers and PCs, you are familiar with common components like CPU,
RAM, Disk, network, and so on.
When
using server virtualization, each guest operating system will have its own
virtual components such as the virtual CPU, virtual memory (RAM), virtual disk,
virtual network, and so on.
Inside
the guest operating system, the OS will see these devices as physical devices
and you may or may not have the vendor’s virtualization driver loaded for that
device. These virtual devices are configured in the virtual guest configuration
for that VM, in the management interface for your virtualization software.
36.
Why do I need to care about the hardware requirements of VMware ESX and
Microsoft Hyper-V?
Type
1 virtualization platforms that run on the bare metal of your server hardware
will have specific hardware requirements because they are not typical
applications that run inside an underlying (host) operating system. Because of
this, type-1 virtualization platforms will have strict hardware requirements.
For example, Hyper-V must run on 64 bit hardware and VMware ESX Server only
support certain disk storage systems and network interface cards.
For
more information on the hardware requirements of these two virtualization
platforms, please see: Microsoft Hyper-V Hardware Requirements
VMware
ESX Server Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)
37.What
is a snapshot?
A
snapshot is a “point in time image” of a virtual guest operating system (VM).
That snapshot contains an image of the VMs disk, RAM, and devices at the time
the snapshot was taken. With the snapshot, you can return the VM to that point
in time, whenever you choose. All changes made after the snapshot was taken may
be based on that snapshot information (incremental changes). You can take
snapshots of your VMs, no matter what guest OS you have and the snapshot
functionality can be used for features like performing image level backups of
the VMs without ever shutting them down. Do not confuse Virtual Machine Snapshots
with Microsoft’s VSS (Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service). Snapshots can be
taken in just about every virtualization platform available.
38.What
is Quick Migration?
Quick
Migration is a feature of Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization platform. With
Quick Migration, you can move running virtual machines from one host to another
host server with minimal downtime. This feature is comparable to VMware’s
VMotion except Quick Migration, in its current incarnation, is not as quick as
VMotion (VMotion is about 1 second vs Quick Migration of about 5-20 second)
39. Why won’t my
virtualization product boot from my OS CD to load my new guest OS?
Many
times, admins have complained that they could not access or could not boot a
virtual CDROM that was inserted or an ISO file that was mapped.
And
so many times, the cause of this issue is just a simply click. To access a
virtual CDROM, that CDROM must be connected. If you look at the graphic
below, you can see how the device is both connected and connected at
power on. Connected devices are connected after the VM boots where
as connected at power on devices, are connected before the VM boots. To
boot a new OS CD, that CDROM needs to be connected at power on.
40.
What do I need to know about licensing and Virtualization?
Concerning
licensing and virtualization – the most important thing to know is that any guest
operating system must have a license, just as any physical server or
workstation does. Thus, if you run Microsoft Virtual Server on Windows
Server 2003 and 3 guest operating systems are running (Windows XP, Windows
Server 2008, and Windows Vista), you must have 4 Microsoft operating system
licenses – Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server
2008.
As
Linux is typically open source, you can generally have as many Linux guest
operating systems as you want without paying any licensing fees.
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