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First Look At VMware's vSphere "Cloud OS"
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Paul Venezia takes VMware's purported 'cloud OS,' vSphere 4, for a test drive. The bottom line: 'VMware vSphere 4.0 touches on almost every aspect of managing a virtual infrastructure, from ESX host provisioning to virtual network management to backup and recovery of virtual machines. Time will tell whether these features are as solid as they need to be in this release, but their presence is a substantial step forward for virtual environments.' Among the features Venezia finds particularly worthwhile is vSphere's Fault Tolerance: 'In a nutshell, this allows you to run the same VM in tandem across two hardware nodes, but with only one instance actually visible to the network. You can think of it as OS-agnostic clustering. Should a hardware failure take out the primary instance, the secondary instance will assume normal operations instantly, without requiring a VMotion.'"
With no delay at all? Somehow I don't believe it - there is always delay, but I wonder if it is "significant" enough to be noticed by an end-user.
He didn't say to use a single vCPU for a non-SMP aware app, he said to use a single vCPU for all application loads. For SMP aware apps, adding another virtual CPU is a scaling option. If you have non-SMP aware apps, then you need to find another solution, like migrate to a host with faster cores.
It makes sense. If you have 32 workloads and 16 cores, don't add the overhead of making 64 virtual vCPUs, 32 will use the host resources more efficiently as long as one app doesn't need the power of more than one core. If it does, give it to the guest only when it needs it.