oceansoul
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Registered: 19th Jun 06
Location: Sunbury, Surrey
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I know some people on here have experience with virtual machines and im after a basic guide of whats what  At work we are getting a new control system and its all being visualized. I understand that means 1 (or 2) physical machines each running virtual machines, but i dont get all the different aspects.
iDrac, esxi, hypervisor, vsphere, RMC?
Also why does each physical machine need 7 or 8 network connections into the switch? How do back ups work? Would i need to image each virtual machine that is running or the physical machine, or do i have a "virtual machine file" of some sort?
Going to ask these questions when the system comes to site, but i thought i'd get a heads up before hand.
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John
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Registered: 30th Jun 03
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I started typing out a reply but you are much better googling it. They are all well known things so you'll get proper explanations.
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Dom
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Registered: 13th Sep 03
User status: Offline
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quote:
Originally posted by oceansoul
iDrac, esxi, hypervisor, vsphere, RMC?
Hypervisor is the layer that sits in between the physical bare metal hardware (or on top of a 'host' OS in some cases) and the virtualised containers - ESXi is just one hypervisor that is available.
vSphere is a product suite which includes ESXi and vCenter (control panel app to control ESXi hypervisors).
iDrac is a Dell feature/product that allows a user complete remote control and access of the hardware as if they were sitting in front of it.
No idea about RMC.
Tbh, look at the Wiki pages for the various terms; it'll give you a better definition and understanding than the above
quote:
Originally posted by oceansoul
Also why does each physical machine need 7 or 8 network connections into the switch?
One will be for iDrac interface, the rest will allow the hypervisor to provide physical NIC connections to virtual containers rather than using 'bridging' (essentially bridges one physical network connection with multiple software network connections that are presented to the virtual containers).
It also allows you deploy features like network teaming.
quote:
Originally posted by oceansoul
How do back ups work?
Depends how it's setup but usually people will use software like Veeam to create backups of the containers.
quote:
Originally posted by oceansoul
Would i need to image each virtual machine that is running or the physical machine, or do i have a "virtual machine file" of some sort?
If it's a bare server then you install the hypervisor (or if it runs on top of a host OS then you install the host OS and then the hypervisor); create the virtual containers and carve up the physical hardware accordingly; and then install OS's/Apps etc within the containers.
Once setup, the containers are essentially a load of files that you can move around (in theory) to other physical hardware, ie - in the event of hardware failure you could move the containers to different hardware, boot them up and restore the necessary service(s).
There's loads of wiki tutorials, whitesheets and books on virtualising - so it's worth hunting out a few. And similarly there's plenty of desktop hypervisors available (like VirtualBox which is free) that you could install and have a play around with to give you a better understanding of it all.
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