Resource Management in VMware Powered Cloud: Concepts and Techniques

In this tutorial we will discuss three layers of VMware software stack that work together to create a cloud environment. These layers include ESX hypervisor, VirtualCenter (vCenter) for management and vCloud Director to combine various virtual centers in to a scalable cloud environment. I will describe each one of these in more detail, while focusing on resource management controls that are provided at each layer. First, I will present the high level architecture of ESX and resource management model that is available for better performance isolation among VMs and high consolidation. ESX provides a very rich set of controls for all resources including CPU, memory, network and storage IO. The next step in resource management is providing techniques to handle a group or cluster of hosts. VMware technologies such as DRS can take care of automatically placing VMs on a cluster and performing load balancing across hosts using live migration of VMs (a.k.a. vMotion). Similarly a recent feature called Storage DRS provides initial placement of virtual disks on a cluster of storage devices and does load balancing across storage devices using live virtual disk migration. I will conclude with our cloud product called vCloud Director, which allows federation of multiple vCenters.