VMware-vSphere5.5-Platform-Whats-New(4)

vSphere 5.5最新资料

T E C H N I C A L W H I T E P A P E R / 4

vSphere ESXi Hypervisor Enhancements

Hot-Pluggable PCIe SSD Devices

The ability to hot-swap traditional storage devices such as SATA and SAS hard disks on a running vSphere host has been a huge benefit to systems administrators in reducing the amount of downtime for virtual machine workloads. Solid-state disks (SSDs) are becoming more prevalent in the enterprise datacenter, and this same capability has been expanded to support SSD devices. Similarly as with SATA and SAS hard disks, users are now able to hot-add or hot-remove an SSD device while a vSphere host is running, and the underlying storage stack detects the operation.

Support for Reliable Memory Technology

The most critical component to vSphere ESXi Hypervisor is the VMkernel, which is a purpose-built operating system (OS) to run virtual machines. Because vSphere ESXi Hypervisor runs directly in memory, an error in it can potentially crash it and the virtual machines running on the host. To provide greater resiliency and to protect against memory errors, vSphere ESXi Hypervisor can now take advantage of Reliable Memory Technology, a CPU hardware feature through which a region of memory is reported from the hardware to vSphere ESXi

Hypervisor as being more “reliable.” This information is then used to optimize the placement of the VMkernel and

other critical components such as the initial thread, hostd and the watchdog process and helps guard against memory errors.

Enhancements to CPU C-States

In vSphere 5.1 and earlier, the balanced policy for host power management leveraged only the performance state (P-state), which kept the processor running at a lower frequency and voltage. In vSphere 5.5, the deep processor power state (C-state) also is used, providing additional power savings. Another potential benefit of reduced power consumption is with inherent increased performance, because turbo mode frequencies on Intel chipsets can be reached more quickly while other CPU cores in the physical package are in deep C-states.