VMware ESXi (formerly ESX) is an enterprise-class, type-1hypervisor developed by VMware for deploying and servingvirtual computers. As a type-1 hypervisor, ESXi is not a software application that is installed on an operating system (OS); instead, it includes and integrates vital OS components, such as a kernel.[2]
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After version 4.1 (released in 2010), VMware renamed ESX to ESXi. ESXi replaces Service Console (a rudimentary operating system) with a more closely integrated OS. ESX/ESXi is the primary component in the VMware Infrastructuresoftware suite.[3]
The name ESX originated as an abbreviation of Elastic Sky X.[4][5] In September 2004, the replacement for ESX was internally called VMvisor, but later changed to ESXi (as the 'i' in ESXi stood for 'integrated').[6][7]
Architecture[edit]
ESX runs on bare metal (without running an operating system)[8] unlike other VMware products.[9] It includes its own kernel: A Linux kernel is started first,[10] and is then used to load a variety of specialized virtualization components, including ESX, which is otherwise known as the vmkernel component.[11] The Linux kernel is the primary virtual machine; it is invoked by the service console. At normal run-time, the vmkernel is running on the bare computer, and the Linux-based service console runs as the first virtual machine. VMware dropped development of ESX at version 4.1, and now uses ESXi, which does not include a Linux kernel.[12]
The vmkernel is a microkernel[13] with three interfaces: hardware, guest systems, and the service console (Console OS).
Interface to hardware[edit]
The vmkernel handles CPU and memory directly, using scan-before-execution (SBE) to handle special or privileged CPU instructions[14][15]and the SRAT (system resource allocation table) to track allocated memory.[16]
Access to other hardware (such as network or storage devices) takes place using modules. At least some of the modules derive from modules used in the Linux kernel. To access these modules, an additional module called
vmklinux implements the Linux module interface. According to the README file, 'This module contains the Linux emulation layer used by the vmkernel.'[17]
The vmkernel uses the device drivers:[17]
These drivers mostly equate to those described in VMware's hardware compatibility list.[18] All these modules fall under the GPL. Programmers have adapted them to run with the vmkernel: VMware Inc has changed the module-loading and some other minor things.[17]
Service console[edit]
In ESX (and not ESXi), the Service Console is a vestigial general purpose operating system most significantly used as bootstrap for the VMware kernel, vmkernel, and secondarily used as a management interface. Both of these Console Operating System functions are being deprecated from version 5.0, as VMware migrates exclusively to the ESXi model.[19]The Service Console, for all intents and purposes, is the operating system used to interact with VMware ESX and the virtual machines that run on the server.
Purple Screen of Death[edit]
A purple diagnostic screen as seen in VMware ESX Server 3.0
A purple diagnostic screen from VMware ESXi 4.1
In the event of a hardware error, the vmkernel can catch a Machine Check Exception.[20] This results in an error message displayed on a purple diagnostic screen. This is colloquially known as a purple diagnostic screen, or purple screen of death (PSoD, cf. Blue Screen of Death (BSoD)).
Upon displaying a purple diagnostic screen, the vmkernel writes debug information to the core dump partition. This information, together with the error codes displayed on the purple diagnostic screen can be used by VMware support to determine the cause of the problem.
Versions[edit]
VMware ESX is available in two main types: ESX and ESXi, although since version 5 only ESXi is continued.
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ESX and ESXi before version 5.0 do not support Windows 8/Windows 2012. These Microsoft operating systems can only run on ESXi 5.x or later.[21]
VMware ESXi, a smaller-footprint version of ESX, does not include the ESX Service Console. It is available - without the need to purchase a vCenter license - as a free download from VMware, with some features disabled.[22][23][24]
ESXi apparently stands for 'ESX integrated'.[25]
VMware ESXi originated as a compact version of VMware ESX that allowed for a smaller 32 MB disk footprint on the host. With a simple configuration console for mostly network configuration and remote based VMware Infrastructure Client Interface, this allows for more resources to be dedicated to the guest environments.
Two variations of ESXi exist:
The same media can be used to install either of these variations depending on the size of the target media.[26] One can upgrade ESXi to VMware Infrastructure 3[27]or to VMware vSphere 4.0 ESXi.
Originally named VMware ESX Server ESXi edition, through several revisions the ESXi product finally became VMware ESXi 3. New editions then followed: ESXi 3.5, ESXi 4, ESXi 5 and (as of 2015) ESXi 6.
GPL violation lawsuit[edit]
VMware has been sued by Christoph Hellwig, a Linux kernel developer, for GPL license violations. It was alleged that VMware had misappropriated portions of the Linux kernel,[28] and used them without permission. The lawsuit was dismissed by the court in July 2016[29] and Hellwig announced he would file an appeal.[30]
The appeal was decided February 2019 and again dismissed by the German court, on the basis of not meeting 'procedural requirements for the burden of proof of the plaintiff'.[31]
Related or additional products[edit]
The following products operate in conjunction with ESX:
Cisco Nexus 1000v[edit]
Network-connectivity between ESX hosts and the VMs running on it relies on virtual NICs (inside the VM) and virtual switches. The latter exists in two versions: the 'standard' vSwitch allowing several VMs on a single ESX host to share a physical NIC and the 'distributed vSwitch' where the vSwitches on different ESX hosts together form one logical switch. Cisco offers in their Cisco Nexus product-line the Nexus 1000v, an advanced version of the standard distributed vSwitch. A Nexus 1000v consists of two parts: a supervisor module (VSM) and on each ESX host a virtual ethernet module (VEM). The VSM runs as a virtual appliance within the ESX cluster or on dedicated hardware (Nexus 1010 series) and the VEM runs as module on each host and replaces a standard dvS (distributed virtual switch) from VMware.Configuration of the switch is done on the VSM using the standard NX-OSCLI. It offers capabilities to create standard port-profiles which can then be assigned to virtual machines using vCenter.
There are several differences between the standard dvS and the N1000v; one is that the Cisco switch generally has full support for network technologies such as LACP link aggregation or that the VMware switch supports new features such as routing based on physical NIC load. However the main difference lies in the architecture: Nexus 1000v is working in the same way as a physical Ethernet switch does while dvS is relying on information from ESX. This has consequences for example in scalability where the Kappa limit for a N1000v is 2048 virtual ports against 60000 for a dvS. The Nexus1000v is developed in co-operation between Cisco and VMware and uses the API of the dvS[36]
Third party management tools[edit]
Because VMware ESX is a leader in the server-virtualisation market,[37] software and hardware vendors offer a range of tools to integrate their products or services with ESX. Examples are the products from Veeam Software with backup and management applications[38] and a plugin to monitor and manage ESX using HP OpenView,[39]Quest Software with a range of management and backup-applications and most major backup-solution providers have plugins or modules for ESX. Using Microsoft Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007/2012 with a Bridgeways ESX management pack gives you a realtime ESX datacenter health view.
Also, hardware-vendors such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell include tools to support the use of ESX(i) on their hardware platforms. An example is the ESX module for Dell's OpenManage management platform.[40]
VMware has added a Web Client[41] since v5 but it will work on vCenter only and does not contain all features.[42] vEMan[43] is a Linux application which is trying to fill that gap. These are just a few examples: there are numerous 3rd party products to manage, monitor or backup ESX infrastructures and the VMs running on them.[44]
Known limitations[edit]
Known limitations of VMware ESXi, as of Sept 2019, include the following:
Infrastructure limitations[edit]
Some maximums in ESXi Server 6.7 may influence the design of data centers:[45]
Performance limitations[edit]
In terms of performance, virtualization imposes a cost in the additional work the CPU has to perform to virtualize the underlying hardware. Instructions that perform this extra work, and other activities that require virtualization, tend to lie in operating system calls. In an unmodified operating system, OS calls introduce the greatest portion of virtualization 'overhead'.[citation needed]
Paravirtualization or other virtualization techniques may help with these issues. VMware developed the Virtual Machine Interface for this purpose, and selected operating systems currently support this. A comparison between full virtualization and paravirtualization for the ESX Server[46] shows that in some cases paravirtualization is much faster.
Network limitations[edit]
When using the advanced and extended network capabilities by using the Cisco Nexus 1000v distributed virtual switch the following network-related limitations apply:[36]
Fibre Channel Fabric limitations[edit]
Regardless of the type of virtual SCSI adapter used, there are these limitations:[47]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
External links[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=VMware_ESXi&oldid=916580301'
VMware, Inc. is a publicly traded software company listed on the NYSE under stock ticker VMW. Dell Technologies is a majority share holder. VMware provides cloud computing and virtualization software and services.[6] It was one of the first commercially successful companies to virtualize the x86 architecture.[7]
VMware's desktop software runs on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and macOS, while its enterprise softwarehypervisor for servers, VMware ESXi, is a bare-metal hypervisor that runs directly on server hardware without requiring an additional underlying operating system.[8]
History[edit]
In 1998, VMware was founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Ellen Wang and Edouard Bugnion.[9] Greene and Rosenblum, who are married, first met while at the University of California, Berkeley.[10] Edouard Bugnion remained the chief architect and CTO of VMware until 2005,[11] and went on to found Nuova Systems (now part of Cisco). For the first year, VMware operated in stealth mode, with roughly 20 employees by the end of 1998. The company was launched officially early in the second year, in February 1999, at the DEMO Conference organized by Chris Shipley.[12] The first product, VMware Workstation, was delivered in May 1999, and the company entered the server market in 2001 with VMware GSX Server (hosted) and VMware ESX Server (hostless).[12][13]
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In 2003, VMware launched VMware Virtual Center, vMotion, and Virtual SMP technology. 64-bit support was introduced in 2004.
On January 9, 2004, under the terms of the definitive agreement announced on December 15, 2003, EMC (now Dell EMC) acquired the company with $625 million in cash.[14][15] On August 14, 2007, EMC sold 15% of VMware to the public via an initial public offering. Shares were priced at US$29 per share and closed the day at US$51.[16][17]
On July 8, 2008, after disappointing financial performance, the board of directors fired VMware co-founder, president and CEO Diane Greene, who was replaced by Paul Maritz, a retired 14-year Microsoft veteran who was heading EMC's cloud computing business unit.[18] Greene had been CEO since the company's founding, ten years earlier.[19] On September 10, 2008, Mendel Rosenblum, the company's co-founder, chief scientist, and the husband of Diane Greene, resigned.[20]
On September 16, 2008, VMware announced a collaboration with Cisco Systems.[21] One result was the Cisco Nexus 1000V, a distributed virtual software switch, an integrated option in the VMware infrastructure.[22]
In April 2011, EMC transferred control of the Mozy backup service to VMware.[23]
On April 12, 2011, VMware released an open-source platform-as-a-service system called Cloud Foundry, as well as a hosted version of the service. This supported application deployment for Java, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Node.js, and Scala, as well as database support for MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Postgres, RabbitMQ.[24][25]
In March 2013, VMware announced the corporate spin-off of Pivotal Software, with General Electric making an investment in the company. D-link software download. All of VMware's application- and developer-oriented products, including Spring, tc Server, Cloud Foundry, RabbitMQ, GemFire, and SQLFire were transferred to this organization.[26]
In May 2013, VMware launched its own IaaS service, vCloud Hybrid Service, at its new Palo Alto headquarters (vCloud Hybrid Service was rebranded vCloud Air and subsequently sold to cloud provider OVH), announcing an early access program in a Las Vegas data center. The service is designed to function as an extension of its customer's existing vSphere installations, with full compatibility with existing virtual machines virtualized with VMware software and tightly integrated networking. The service is based on vCloud Director 5.1/vSphere 5.1.[27]
In September 2013, at VMworld San Francisco, VMware announced general availability of vCloud Hybrid Service and expansion to Sterling, Virginia, Santa Clara, California, Dallas, Texas, and a service beta in the UK. It announced the acquisition Desktone in October 2013.[28]
In January 2016, in anticipation of Dell's acquisition of EMC, VMware announced a restructuring to reduce about 800 positions, and some executives resigned.[29][30][31][32][33] The entire development team behind VMware Workstation and Fusion was disbanded and all US developers were immediately fired.[29][30][31][33] On April 24, 2016, maintenance release 12.1.1 was released. On September 8, 2016, VMware announced the release of Workstation 12.5 and Fusion 8.5 as a free upgrade supporting Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016.[34]
In April 2016, VMware president and COO Carl Eschenbach left VMware to join Sequoia Capital, and Martin Casado, VMware's general manager for its Networking and Security business, left to join Andreessen Horowitz. Analysts commented that the cultures at Dell and EMC, and at EMC and VMware, are different, and said that they had heard that impending corporate cultural collisions and potentially radical product overlap pruning, would cause many EMC and VMware personnel to leave;[35] VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, following rumours, categorically denied that he would leave.[36][32]
In August 2016 VMware introduced the VMware Cloud Provider website.[37] New branch role is funneling cloud related information as central source of cloud provider technology content. Thanks to a âservices firstâ approach, cloud providers can find differentiated and monetizable services they can deliver leveraging VMwareâs platform. Now the latest case studies, demos, blogs and architecture toolkits of VMware are available in one place.
Mozy was transferred to Dell in 2016 after the merger of Dell and EMC.[38]
In April 2017, according to Glassdoor, VMware was ranked 3rd on the list of highest paying companies in the United States.[39]
In Q2 2017, VMware sold vCloud Air to French cloud service provider OVH.[40]
In August 2017, VMware and Amazon Web Services jointly announced the launch of VMware Cloud on AWS, a SaaS service delivering a vSphere compatible cloud in an AWS datacentre. VMware has since returned to the âhybrid cloudâ naming convention to describe this use of consistent platform across on-prem and public clouds.[citation needed]
Conceptually similar services have since been announced by CloudSimple and Virtustream, hosted in Azure and by CloudSimple hosted in GCP, built on the VMware Cloud Provider Program.[citation needed]
Acquisitions[edit]
Litigation[edit]
In March 2015, the Software Freedom Conservancy announced it was funding litigation by Christoph Hellwig in Hamburg, Germany against VMware for alleged violation of his copyrights in its ESXi product.[94] The SFC claimed VMware was using both the Linux kernel and Busybox without respecting the terms of the GPL copyright license, while VMware told journalists that it believed the case was without merit[95] and expressed disappointment that Conservancy had resorted to litigation.[96]
The lawsuit was dismissed by the court in July 2016[97] and Hellwig announced he would file an appeal.[98] The appeal was decided February 2019 and again dismissed by German court, on the basis of not meeting 'procedural requirements for the burden of proof of the plaintiff.'[99]
Current products[edit]
VMware's most notable products are its hypervisors. VMware became well known for its first type 2 hypervisor known as GSX. This product has since evolved into two hypervisor products lines: VMware's type 1 hypervisors running directly on hardware and their hosted type 2 hypervisors.
VMware software provides a completely virtualized set of hardware to the guest operating system.[100] VMware software virtualizes the hardware for a video adapter, a network adapter, and hard disk adapters. The host provides pass-through drivers for guest USB, serial, and parallel devices. In this way, VMware virtual machines become highly portable between computers, because every host looks nearly identical to the guest. In practice, a system administrator can pause operations on a virtual machine guest, move or copy that guest to another physical computer, and there resume execution exactly at the point of suspension. Alternatively, for enterprise servers, a feature called vMotion allows the migration of operational guest virtual machines between similar but separate hardware hosts sharing the same storage[101] (or, with vMotion Storage, separate storage can be used, too). Each of these transitions is completely transparent to any users on the virtual machine at the time it is being migrated.
VMware Workstation, Server, and ESX take a more optimized path to running target operating systems on the host than that of emulators (such as Bochs) which simulate the function of each CPU instruction on the target machine one-by-one, or that of dynamic recompilation which compiles blocks of machine-instructions the first time they execute, and then uses the translated code directly when the code runs subsequently (Microsoft Virtual PC for macOS takes this approach). VMware software does not emulate an instruction set for different hardware not physically present. This significantly boosts performance, but can cause problems when moving virtual machine guests between hardware hosts using different instruction sets (such as found in 64-bit Intel and AMD CPUs), or between hardware hosts with a differing number of CPUs. Software that is CPU agnostic can usually survive such a transition, unless it is agnostic by forking at startup, in which case, the software or the guest OS must be stopped before moving it, then restarted after the move.
VMware's products predate the virtualization extensions to the x86 instruction set, and do not require virtualization-enabled processors. On newer processors, the hypervisor is now designed to take advantage of the extensions. However, unlike many other hypervisors, VMware still supports older processors. In such cases, it uses the CPU to run code directly whenever possible (as, for example, when running user-mode and virtual 8086 mode code on x86). When direct execution cannot operate, such as with kernel-level and real-mode code, VMware products use binary translation (BT) to re-write the code dynamically. The translated code gets stored in spare memory, typically at the end of the address space, which segmentation mechanisms can protect and make invisible. For these reasons, VMware operates dramatically faster than emulators, running at more than 80% of the speed that the virtual guest operating system would run directly on the same hardware. In one study VMware claims a slowdown over native ranging from 0â6 percent for the VMware ESX Server.[102]
VMware's approach avoids some of the difficulties of virtualization on x86-based platforms. Virtual machines may deal with offending instructions by replacing them, or by simply running kernel code in user mode. Replacing instructions runs the risk that the code may fail to find the expected content if it reads itself; one cannot protect code against reading while allowing normal execution, and replacing in place becomes complicated. Running the code unmodified in user mode will also fail, as most instructions which just read the machine state do not cause an exception and will betray the real state of the program, and certain instructions silently change behavior in user mode. One must always rewrite, performing a simulation of the current program counter in the original location when necessary and (notably) remapping hardware code breakpoints.
Although VMware virtual machines run in user mode, VMware Workstation itself requires the installation of various device drivers in the host operating system, notably to dynamically switch the Global Descriptor Table (GDT) and the Interrupt Descriptor Table (IDT).
The VMware product line can also run different operating systems on a dual-boot system simultaneously by booting one partition natively while using the other as a guest within VMware Workstation.
Desktop software[edit]
Server software[edit]
VMware ESXi,[103] an enterprise software product, can deliver greater performance than the freeware VMware Server, due to lower system computational overhead. VMware ESXi, as a 'bare-metal' product, runs directly on the server hardware, allowing virtual servers to also use hardware more or less directly. In addition, VMware ESXi integrates into VMware vCenter, which offers extra services
Cloud management software[edit]
Application management[edit]Vmware Free Version
The VMware Workspace Portal was a self-service app store for workspace management.[105]
Storage and availability[edit]
VMware's storage and availability products are composed of two primary offerings:
Networking and security products[edit]
VMware NSX is VMware's network virtualization product marketed using the term software-defined data center (SDDC).[116][117] The technology included some acquired from the 2012 purchase of Nicira.[65][66]
Other products[edit]
Workspace ONE allows mobile users to access to apps and data.[118]
The VIX (Virtual Infrastructure eXtension[119]) API allows automated or scripted management of a computer virtualized using either VMware's vSphere, Workstation, Player, or Fusion products. VIX provides bindings for the programming languages C, Perl, Visual Basic, VBscript and C#.[120][121]Nvidia and VMware Launch Hybrid Cloud On AWS with a new hybrid cloud on AWS that is optimized for machine learning, AI, and data science platforms.[122]
See also[edit]References[edit]
External links[edit]
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