Cloning

Enables cloning a virtual machine or template, or cloning a virtual machine to a template.

Migration

The entire state of the virtual machine as well as its configuration file, if necessary, is moved to the new host even while the data storage remains in the same location on shared storage.

vMotion

Enables moving the VM from one physical server to another while the VM remains active.

Template

Uses templates to create new virtual machines by cloning the template as a virtual machine.

Power on

Powers on the virtual machine and boots the guest operating system if the guest operating system is installed.

Power off

Stops the virtual machine until it is powered back. The power off option performs a “hard” power off, which is analogous to pulling the power cable on a physical machine and always works.

Shutdown

Shut Down, or soft power off uses VMware Tools to perform a graceful shutdown of a guest operating system. In certain situations, such as when VMware Tools is not installed or the guest operating system is unresponsive, the shut down might not complete, and you must use the power off option instead

Suspend

Suspends the virtual machine.

Reset or restart

Stops the virtual machine and restarts it.

OVF creation

An OVF package consisting of several files in a directory captures the state of a virtual machine including disk files that are stored in a compressed format. You can export an OVF package to your local computer.

OVA creation

You can create a single OVA package file from the OVF package/template. The OVA can then be distributed more easily; for example, it may be downloaded from a website or moved via a USB key.

Custom MAC address

You can set up the MAC address manually for a virtual network adapter from both vCenter Server and vSphere Client.

Distributed VSwitch

A vSphere distributed switch on a vCenter Server data center can manage networking traffic for all associated hosts on the data center. This feature is available only from vCenter Server.

Distributed resources scheduler

Provides automatic load balancing across hosts.

NIC load balancing

Load balancing and failover policies allow you to determine how network traffic is distributed between adapters and how to reroute traffic if an adapter fails.This feature is available in both vCenter Server and vSphere Client.

NIC teaming

This feature is available in both vCenter Server and vSphere Client and allows you to set up an environment where each virtual switch connects to two uplink adapters that form a NIC team. The NIC teams can then either share the load of traffic between physical and virtual networks among some or all of its members, or provide passive failover in the event of a hardware failure or a network outage.

Note

NIC Teaming can cause a large number of ARP packets to flood the Cisco Catalyst 8000V and overload the CPU. To avoid this situation, reduce the number of ARP packets and implement NIC Teaming as Active-Standby rather than Active-Active.

vSwitch

A vSwitch is a virtualized version of a Layer 2 physical switch. A vSwitch can route traffic internally between virtual machines and link to external networks. You can use vSwitches to combine the bandwidth of multiple network adapters and balance communications traffic among them. You can also configure a vSwitch to handle a physical NIC fail-over. This feature is available in both vCenter Server and vSphere Client.

VM-level high availability

To monitor operating system failures, VM-Level High Availability monitors heartbeat information in the VMware High Availability cluster. Failures are detected when no heartbeat is received from a given virtual machine within a user-specified time interval. VM-Level High Availability is enabled by creating a resource pool of VMs using VMware vCenter Server.

Host-level high availability

To monitor physical servers, an agent on each server maintains a heartbeat with the other servers in the resource pool such that a loss of heartbeat automatically initiates the restart of all affected virtual machines on other servers in the resource pool. Host-Level High Availability is enabled by creating a resource pool of servers or hosts, and enabling high availability in vSphere.

Fault tolerance

Using high availability, fault tolerance is enabled on the ESXi host. When you enable fault tolerance on the VM running the Cisco Catalyst 8000V instance, a secondary VM on another host in the cluster is created. If the primary host goes down, then the VM on the secondary host will take over as the primary VM for the Cisco Catalyst 8000V.