Things to know

Storage Area Network (SAN)

Your old PC’s all required hard disk space, and this is no different in the virtual arena. In order to give a fault tolerant system (two ESX Hosts or more), then a SAN is used, which is essentially a box full of hard disks. This is then effectively available as a resource to each of the ESX hosts. It will have redundant power supplies and have numerous redundant drives, meaning that at least 5 would have to fail before noticeable problems occur. The SAN is networked to the ESX Hosts using Ethernet, and can be as big or as small as you desire. Importantly it can be expanded without shutting down the system, and additional SAN’s can be added to your resource pool.

Snapshots of Virtual Machines

When you make a virtual image of a physical PC, it is essentially a file. This file is referred to as a snapshot, and can be stored away for later reference. In the event that you roll back to a known state for a Virtual Machine, you can simply restore this snapshot, and make it the live machine. This removes the need to worry about ‘What to back up’

What can be virtualised

There is a comprehensive list on the VMware website, however it covers all Windows 32 and 64 bit Operating Systems (NT, XP, 2000, 2003, 2008) as well as DOS, Linux, Mac, Solaris and the list goes on.