Virtual Infrastructure

The introduction of virtualisation technology presents a number of opportunities for driving capital and operational efficiency above and beyond the simple benefit of safe partitioning. VMware's customers have harnessed the power of virtualisation to better manage IT capacity, to provide better service levels, and to streamline IT processes.  We have coined a term for virtualizing the IT infrastructure–we call it the Virtual Infrastructure

What is a Virtual Infrastructure?

In essence, a virtual infrastructure is a dynamic mapping of physical resources to business needs. While a virtual machine represents the physical resources of a single computer, a virtual infrastructure represents the physical resources of the entire IT environment, aggregating x86 computers and their attached network and storage into a unified pool of IT resources.

Structurally, a virtual infrastructure consists of the following components:

By decoupling the entire software environment from its underlying hardware infrastructure, virtualisation enables the aggregation of multiple servers, storage infrastructure and networks into shared pools of resources that can be delivered dynamically, securely and reliably to applications as needed. This pioneering approach enables organisations to build a computing infrastructure with high levels of utilisation, availability, automation and flexibility using building blocks of inexpensive industry-standard servers.

The Virtual Infrastructure breaks down into two main areas;

Virtual Storage:

VMware's VI 3.5