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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
VMware Infrastructure 3 for Dummies will help youunderstand, design, and deploy a reliable and fault tolerantVirtual Infrastructure 3 environment. Virtualization can save yourbusiness a lot of money! You'll find an introduction to thetechnology and learn from the key topics covered in each chapter.You will have enough information to design and deploy your firstsystem without being overwhelmed by extensive technical details.You can also use this book as a reference for maintenance andtroubleshooting. You will find out what you need to do before you virtualize yourmachines. Learn about ESX servers, how to install them and theiranatomy. Hook up your ESX servers with storage and data networksand understand what you need to know about networking and externalstorage. You'll be able to make everything fault tolerantwith cluster technology. Find out how to: * Make the most of VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 * Design and deploy your system * Handle installation, configuration, and troubleshooting * Virtualize servers, storage and networking * Discover how to assure fault tolerance with clusters and theVirtualCenter database * Use resource pools, set them up, and secure them * Explore new options for disaster preparedness, including avirtual consolidated backup Complete with lists of VMware products, the world of virtualappliances, and more information about VI3, VMwareInfrastructure 3For Dummies is your one-stop guide tovirtualizing your machines.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
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VMware® Infrastructure 3 For Dummies®
Table of Contents
VMware® Infrastructure 3 For Dummies®
by William J. Lowe
VMware® Infrastructure 3 For Dummies®
Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2008 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Manufactured in the United States of America
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About the Author
Bill Lowe was tinkering with computers as a hobby long before it became his career. He has been working with computers in various capacities for nearly twenty years. He has been a system administrator, consultant, and held various hands-on technical management positions in several companies. Bill has several industry certifications and a Master of Science degree in Computer Networking from New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is currently pursuing an MBA in Finance at Monmouth University.
Bill is available for speaking opportunities. Please contact him via email at [email protected].
Author’s Acknowledgments
First, I would like to thank Mark Zegarelli for introducing me to the Dummies people. One look at me and he said “You are truly Dummy material!” Mark is the person who took the idea for this book to the Dummies group.
Next I would like to thank Katie Feltman, Blair Pottenger, Teresa Artman, and David Marshall whose sage advice helped make this book far better than I ever could have on my own. Additionally, I would like to thank everyone at Wiley Publishing for all the effort expended putting this book together.
I would also like to thank my parents, Jack and Joan Lowe; my wife’s parents, Howard and Gail Sturdevant; and Duane Flaherty for their encouragement and support.
Additionally, Stephen Foskett has been both inspirational and motivational to me. Stephen, you are the one who got me started on the path that led to this book.
Mervin, Murray, Ross, Jack, and Kathy: You have become more than just mentors to me - I feel like you are family.
Finally, I have saved the best for last. I want to give special thanks to my loving bride, Michele, who can correct grammatical mistakes at the speed of light and spot a typographic error from space. Thank you, I could not have done this without your love, help, and support.
Publisher’s Acknowledgments
We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments through our online registration form located at www.dummies.com/register/.
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Cartoons: Rich Tennant (www.the5thwave.com)
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Proofreaders: John Greenough, Linda Seifert
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Special Help: Richard Meyer
Publishing and Editorial for Technology Dummies
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Introduction
Mainframes, PCs, networks, and the Internet all drastically changed the computer industry. Virtualization based on the x86 platform is another industry reshaper, but what exactly is it?
Your standalone PC comprises hardware and software. You have a CPU, memory, and disk resources. A single operating system sits on top of your hardware resources and controls access to them. On top of your operating system sit applications such as e-mail and word processing. To access the hardware, your applications ask the operating system to perform hardware actions on their behalf. Say you want to save a Word file, like this chapter: You click the Save button, and the word processor says to the operating system, “Please write this data to the hard disk and let me know when you are done.”
The operating system takes the data and calls the disk hardware drivers to write the data to the disk drive. The drivers write the data and tell the operating system that they’re done. Then the operating system tells the word processor that the data has been written to disk. Suddenly, after a few breathless seconds, you happily see that your document has been saved without error.
While you continue writing, your computer has very little to do. In fact, it’s just sitting there waiting for you to type your next character. To understand the wait, you need to understand Hertz (Hz). One Hz is one cycle of something every second. The second hand on a clock moves at a speed one tick a second. Each movement is a complete cycle, so the second hand runs at a speed of one cycle per second, or 1 Hz.
Similarly, you type at a certain number of bits per second (bps). Say that you’re a slow typist like me, and you can type only two characters per second. I don’t know how many words per minute that translates to, but I know that I am a slow typist! Because each character is 8 bits, your data input speed is 16 bits per second (8 bits per character × 2 characters). In other words, your typing speed is 16 Hz.
Your computer is likely running at the speed of at least one billion (1,000,000,000) Hz. If you type as slowly as I do, you’re using only 0.0000016 percent of your computer’s potential resources (16 ÷ 1,000,000,000). In other words, the computer is spending most of its time waiting for you. So, until you can type one billion bits per second, your computer will be eagerly waiting for your next character.
In fact, most computers run at low utilization rates because best practices often dictate using a single machine for a single function. As machines got faster, though, single-purpose machine hardware utilization rates dropped. However, the practice of using single purpose machines continues because it limits the effects of failures and outages to a single application. In fact, even a misbehaving program can’t interfere with another application because they’re on different machines. In this case, a machine is the combination of hardware and software that performs a task for you.
So where am I going with all this? Virtualization simply separates the hardware from the software. A virtual machine is the combination of your applications and operating system. The virtual machine is tricked into thinking that it has its own hardware. However, the hardware is actually shared with several other virtual machines. When one virtual machine is doing nothing, another virtual machine can use the first machine’s share of the hardware. CPU, memory, and disk resources are all split between many virtual machines. This offers a much better utilization rate for your expensive server hardware while still isolating applications by virtual machine. You can read more about this in detail in Chapter 1.
But for now, just know that using virtualization allows you to separate your applications by virtual machine without underutilizing your hardware. When implemented properly, you can run many virtual machines on one piece of hardware. This translates into savings on hardware and hardware maintenance contracts, as well as the cost of server room space and the electricity needed to run the hardware and cooling systems in your server room. Additional savings are achieved by simplified management. Using virtualization is extremely economical.
About This Book
This book is a full and complete introduction to VMware Infrastructure 3. It provides you with all the information you need to design and install a virtual infrastructure. VMware Infrastructure 3 For Dummies explains the components in VMware Infrastructure 3. In addition, planning, designing, installing, and configuring your first VI3 environment is covered. Using VI3 requires you to understand a lot of information, which isn’t difficult when you break it into its most basic parts.
Computer scientists make great use of the term primitive — and not to describe a nonindustrial culture. Computer scientists use primitive to describe the simplest base unit used to create more complex items. For instance
Programming languages use primitive data structures to describe the built-in data types, such as integers.
CPU designers use primitive to describe a single processor instruction, such as add.
VI3 is made of thousands of easily understood primitives combined in groups. These groups are mixed and matched to create a rather complex system.
To help you understand this concept, this book covers
The VI3 components
The functions of the VI3 components
Planning a virtual infrastructure
Installing and configuring a highly fault-tolerant virtual infrastructure
Managing your virtual infrastructure
Backing up and troubleshooting your virtual infrastructure
By explaining the primitives of VI3, how the primitives are grouped into functionality, and how all that functionality is combined into a complex system, this book explains VI3 in a friendly and easily digestible way. You’ve likely read other For Dummies books, and I’m proud to continue in the true For Dummies tradition. In fact, my wife has been referring to me as a dummy for years. This book finally proves it!
Conventions Used in This Book
VI3 encompasses a huge amount of information. No single piece of it is too complex, but the sheer volume of information might make mastering VI3 seem a bit daunting. Because each complex concept is formed by linking many simpler concepts — or primitives (see the preceding section) — I try to introduce concepts in the For Dummies conversational manner and move from complex and general to simple and specific. Here are some ways I break this down for you:
Bulleted lists, I bold any concept that is followed by a definition.
If a list is just general information that does not require further definition, regular text is used.
The main steps of numbered lists appear in bold while step explanations are regular text.
Command paths, Web addresses, code, and onscreen messages are presented in monofont.
What You’re Not to Read
This book caters to three different audiences with different informational needs:
Non-technical managers who want a simple overview of virtualization need not read the entire book. The Introduction through Chapter 2 will suffice for an overview. I recommend reviewing Chapter 12 for an understanding of fault tolerance, and Chapter 20 is a good chapter to read for an understanding of virtual appliances.
A technical manager who isn’t implementing a virtual infrastructure but wants to understand how it works should read the entire book but can skip lists and information denoted with a Technical Stuff icon.
A system designer or implementation person should read the entire book. Sorry, implementers, but you have the most reading to do. I’ll try to make it concise and as painless as possible.
Foolish Assumptions
In the interest of time and space, I’ve made several assumptions about you, the reader:
You’ve mastered using a personal computer and moved on to server installation and administration.
You have a conceptual understanding of networking concepts and storage area networks (SANs). (For a little brush-up reading, check out Storage Area Networks For Dummies, 2nd Edition by Christopher Poelker, Wiley.)
You prefer using a GUI interface to the command line, which is good because VI3 makes the same assumption!
For more on these topics, I recommend finding other For Dummies books as your guide. Specifically, look for Virtualization For Dummies,Networking For Dummies,Windows Server 2003 For Dummies, and perhaps one of the For Dummies books about Linux.
How This Book Is Organized
VMware Infrastructure3 For Dummies is divided into six parts. Each part builds upon the information covered in the part before it. If you’re brand-new to VI3, your best bet is to read this book sequentially. If you already have a pretty solid understanding of the subject, feel free to jump to whatever chapter you fancy. Here is what you can find in each part.
Part I: Ready, Set, Go with VMware Infrastructure 3
Part I provides the information needed to understand what VMware Infrastructure 3 is and what you need to do before you begin virtualizing your physical machines.
Part II: Setting Up ESX Hosts
The heart and soul of a virtual infrastructure is the ESX host. ESX hosts are the foundation of your virtual house. This part covers the anatomy and installation of ESX hosts.
Part III: Connecting the Physical to Your Virtual Environment
ESX hosts can’t exist in a vacuum. Connecting them to storage and data networks is a necessary step in any virtual system. Networking and external storage are covered in this part of the book.
Of course, the fun doesn’t stop there. After networking and storage are configured, you need to license and manage your servers. One of the best ways is by using VMware VirtualCenter. At this point, you’ll have all the pieces in place to start easily creating and managing powerful virtual machines.
Part IV: Fault Tolerance and Data Centers
For production systems, fault tolerance is a necessity. This is especially true when you virtualize since a single failure can interrupt several machines. This part describes VirtualCenter, creating and managing virtual machines, and making everything fault tolerant with cluster technology.
Part V: Playing Virtual Administrator
Part V delves into the administrative functions of virtual infrastructures. Security, resource utilization and monitoring, backups, and troubleshooting are all covered in this part.
Part VI: The Part of Tens
This traditional For Dummies part devotes the concluding chapters to finding more information about VI3, other VMware products, and the world of virtual appliances.
Icons Used in This Book
All For Dummies books have an array of useful and explanatory icons. Here are the ones I use in this book.
This icon highlights information that can make your life far easier. For example, version 3.5 of VMware Infrastructure 3 was released during the writing of this book, and I use this icon to draw your attention to those things new or different from version 3.0.x.
The Remember icon points to a fact or issue you’ll likely need.
This icon highlights potentially nefarious conditions. Pay particular attention when you see this icon, for danger is near.
When you see this icon, you’re about to delve into the inner technical workings of something. And although understanding the inner workings is important, you can skip these sections if you’ve already absorbed enough information to meet your goal.
When you see this icon, you know a story follows. These stories illustrate points in the text and have actually happened to me or one of my friends. It’s better than learning something the hard way!
Where to Go from Here
If you’re already familiar with VI3, you can jump to any part of the book that catches your interest. However, if you’re not familiar with VI3, you should read the book from start to finish.
Having said that, keep this in mind while reading this book: Computer systems and software are always in a rapid state of change, which means some items in this book might quickly become dated. Always review the VMware Web site or one of the other sites mentioned in Chapter 18 to make sure that you’re armed with the latest knowledge.
Part I
Ready, Set, Go with VMware Infrastructure 3
In this part . . .
This part introduces you to virtualization, using VMware Infrastructure 3. Chapter 1 covers Infrastructure 3’s many tools and the advantages of using VMware’s flagship product.
Chapter 2 introduces you to capacity-planning concepts and tools so you can adequately plan the hardware you need to implement your virtualization effort. This part concludes with Chapter 3, providing a review of the different storage options to choose from.
Chapter 1
Exploring VMware Infrastructure 3 as Your Virtual Solution
In This Chapter
How virtualization works
Benefits of virtualization
Parts of VMware Infrastructure 3
Planning your virtualization
VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) is a robust, feature-rich, fault-tolerant, and highly reliable platform for virtualization. In fact, VMware created x86-based virtualization. (Now that I got that out of my system, it’s time to explore the possibilities of saving time and money with your virtualization project.)
Most x86 computers don’t use their hardware to the fullest capacity because de facto system design often dictates that you use a single server for a single purpose. As I mention in the book’s Introduction, virtualization simply uses “smoke and mirrors” to separate your programs and operating systems from the hardware on which they run. That way, many virtual machines use common hardware, and the hardware is far better utilized.
In this chapter, virtual machines, ESX hosts, the benefits of virtulization, and VI3 are covered. Additionally, the last section describes the major steps in implementing your virtual infrastructure.
Knowing What You Must About Virtual Machines
Making as many of your physical machines as possible become virtual is the end game of virtualization. The more you virtualize (convert physical to virtual machines), the more benefits you see, and the more you realize how reliable and stable a platform VMware Infrastructure 3 is. Being skeptical by nature, I went slowly at first, but I quickly began to trust VMware the more I worked with it.
Virtual machines: The non-physical workhorses
For all intents and purposes, virtual machines are just like physical machines. You can log on to them; and they have BIOS, hard disks, memory, CPUs, operating systems, and applications. In fact, if you connect remotely to a machine, you’ll never know that it’s virtual unless someone tells you. Virtual machines work and behave just like physical machines. Even the machines themselves don’t even know they are virtual!
Virtual machine pluses and minuses
Aside from all the general benefits of virtualization (covered in the “Benefitting from VMware Infrastructure 3” section, later in this chapter), here are the major pluses for using virtual machines:
They can be rebooted much faster than physical machines. I was able to reboot one server in 15 seconds!
They are more simpler than their physical counterparts. For instance, there are no array controllers to configure in the virtual machines.
They are easy to back up and restore. The entire machine is stored in a set of files.
Unfortunately, there are also downsides. However, you can easily minimize the downsides:
Support can be a gray area. Some software vendors might tell you, “Hey, it’s on a virtual machine. We don’t support that.” Pay for VMware support and know your own operating systems to mitigate this risk.
Troubleshooting can be a little tricky. People troubleshooting a problem on a virtual machine might incorrectly deduce the problem is caused because the machine is virtual. As long as you hone your own troubleshooting skills, this risk is minimized.
I had a consultant tell me that the most likely problem with a report running slowly and having connectivity issues was because the server was virtual. I had to prove to her that it was the report — not the virtual machine — before we could resolve the issue.
Inherent flaws are transferable. Flaws in a virtual infrastructure design can affect all virtual machines. This, in turn, will affect all users of those machines. Watch where you make your trade-offs, and design your system with ample capacity to avoid this risk.
Some apps can be troublesome for time syncs. For example, I have one application that throws off the virtual machine’s time sync. You can compensate for this by synching the virtual machine’s time to the ESX (Engagement Simulation Exercise) host. (An ESX host is a server that your virtual machines run on. It provides access to all the hardware resources your virtual machines share.) In turn, sync your ESX host to your network’s time source.
Symmetrical multiprocessing and why you care
Commonly, physical machines use multiple processors. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a server that doesn’t come with at least a dual-core processor. Each core is treated as a separate CPU, so a machine using a single, dual-core CPU is taking advantage of symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP). In the physical world, multiple CPUs can greatly aid in processing speed. Things are a little different in the virtual world, however.
Your ESX host will most likely have multiple processors with multiple cores. Whenever your virtual machine needs the CPU, the VMkernel (covered in the next section) can send the work to any CPU in your ESX host. Your single CPU virtual machine is, therefore, getting benefits similar to SMP without even knowing it.
If you have a license for SMP, you can assign multiple processors to a virtual machine. However, just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. Dual, virtual CPU machines force co-scheduling of physical processors.
With co-scheduling, if one physical processor is scheduled, a second one is as well. This can take resources away from your other virtual machines. Additionally, if Process 1 on virtual CPU1 is waiting too long for Process 2 on virtual CPU2 to finish, both processes might get scheduled out (finish their allotted share of CPU time and lose the processor until their next turn) before completion. This can negate the benefits of using multiple CPUs.
Best practices dictate adding multiple CPUs to a virtual machine only if you can prove an increase in performance. This is because multiple virtual CPUs can have some negative side effects:
Potential performance hit: If you give a virtual machine multiple CPUs, you remove some of the scheduling flexibility available to the VMkernel. This trade-off might (no guarantee) give a few machines a performance boost, but at the cost of your other virtual machines losing performance. If you really need one machine to have a performance boost, you might want to try using a resource pool instead of SMP. Resource pools are covered in Chapter 14.
Prevent processor fragmentation: If you have two, single-core processors or two, dual-core processors, you can create a processor fragmentation scenario using SMP. If you create a dual-CPU virtual machine, it might experience processor starvation.
Say a single CPU virtual machine is running on one processor, and the dual CPU machine has two active threads ready to run. Both threads need to be co-scheduled, but one physical CPU is in use, so neither thread is scheduled. Meanwhile, only one physical CPU is in use, and the other is just sitting there: doing nothing. Enabling hyperthreading (making a single processor appear as two processors to an SMP-aware operating system to make the CPU run more efficiently) allows a single-core CPU to act like two physical CPUs for a virtual machine. Enabling it alleviates the processor fragmentation problem in systems that have more than one processor.
Understanding the Role That VMkernel Plays
Even though each of your virtual machines thinks that it has its own dedicated hardware, the machines actually share a common pool of hardware. The magician creating this illusion is the VMkernel that runs on each ESX host. The simplest way to think of the VMkernel is as a scheduler: It schedules virtual machines access to resources. The VMkernel even schedules the management console that you use to configure and operate your ESX hosts. The VMkernel virtualization model is shown in Figure 1-1.
As shown in Figure 1-1, there are three layers to the VMkernel virtualization model:
Virtual Machine layer: Here all your operating systems and applications are neatly housed in separate virtual machines. Each virtual machine thinks it is a physical machine with its own hardware, but this is not the case. The ESX tricks all the virtual machines.
ESX layer: The VMkernel is the boss of this layer. The kernel schedules hardware for the virtual machines as well as the management interface. The VMkernel is a liar. It tells all the virtual machines that they are physical entities and have access to their own hardware.
Shared Resources layer: This layer consists of all your hardware subsystems. It includes your physical and storage area networks.
Figure 1-1: The VMkernel virtualization model.
VMware Infrastructure 3
Using the VMware Infrastructure product suite enables you to virtualize servers, storage, and networks. In addition, the suite offers you ways to add extreme fault tolerance as well as centralized management, load leveling, and centralized backup.
VMware always offers several different ways to purchase their products. Below are the offerings for version 3.5 (the offerings for 3.0 were entirely different):
Single ESX: You can buy the plain ESX that you install on a hard drive or ESXi, which has the operating system on a chip instead of a hard drive.
VMware Infrastructure Foundation: This is ESX with a few bells and whistles and offers you automated updates, a VirtualCenter Agent, and Update Manager.
VMware Infrastructure Standard: This is ESX with more bells and whistles and offers everything in the Foundation level plus High Availability. This allows you to essentially create an active-passive cluster and would be the minimum level of fault tolerance that is acceptable for production systems.
VMware Infrastructure Enterprise: Every available option — If you want it all, then this is for you. This package provides every possible feature to enable active-active fault tolerance and dynamic load balancing across servers. If you are virtualizing datacenters, you want the Enterprise package.
Benefitting from VMware Infrastructure 3
Virtualization simply makes life easier from a technical and administrative viewpoint. Fortunately, it also makes life easier from an economic viewpoint, so everyone can agree that virtualization is a good thing. Before you decide to virtualize, consider some of its many benefits:
Better hardware usage rates: This translates to needing less hardware to do the same amount of work.
Lower hardware-maintenance costs: You need fewer physical servers, which means less maintenance contracts to pay for.
Lower cooling costs: Less heat is generated, so less cooling is needed.
Lower electric costs: You have fewer physical servers so your electric bill drops. VMware is a very green technology.
Lower space costs: Your server room can be much smaller, which leaves more room for offices. And face it, it is the people in the office that produce your company’s income. The server room is an expense that you can help minimize.
Longer infrastructure run time from UPSes: If you virtualize all your physical servers and keep the same UPS system, think how much longer it can run during an outage — especially if you are condensing twenty or thirty virtual machines onto one physical machine.
Faster server deployment: You can deploy a new server in as little time as about 15 minutes. And you don’t need to spec-out hardware and wait for delivery. In fact, deploying a server from a template is as easy as right-clicking and answering a few simple questions.
Simplified management: All your virtual servers use the same drivers, and servers are just a collection of files on a hard disk. Whether you’re installing a program or adding virtual hardware to a server, all servers are managed through the same client.
I’ve added “hardware” to a virtual server in New Jersey remotely from a beach in Sarasota. Nice!
Easy backup and fast recovery: Again, your servers are just a bunch of files.
The ability to freeze your server in time through snapshots: You can take a snapshot before applying a Service Pack. If you have problems after the update, you can go back in time to before the service pack was applied instead of rebuilding your server and restoring your data. Fixing a bad update takes only minutes instead of hours.
Quality-of-life improvement: All the time and effort saved makes your IT life much better! All the money you save makes management extremely happy as well. Everyone benefits from virtualization.
After reading this list of benefits, you likely think that using virtualization can prevent many IT headaches — and you’re right! Time to meet the components of VI3.
After you start to virtualize machines, it can become very addictive. You might even get the overwhelming urge to create far more virtual machines than you actually need. You should resist that urge! In fact, this is called virtual machine sprawl. While it does not take up as much space as physical server sprawl, it can be detrimental from an efficiency, resource, and management point of view. As a rule of thumb, only create a virtual machine if you would have created a physical machine to accomplish your goal in the past.
Meeting the pieces and parts of VMware Infrastructure 3
Many pieces make up VI3, and each has a specific purpose to help create a seamless whole. Although you can purchase different parts separately, buying them as a package costs less. If you’re virtualizing your infrastructure, you will want the entire product suite.
Here’s a list of what’s included in the VI3Enterprise Suite:
VMware ESX: This comprises the operating system that you put on your server hardware that allows you to create virtual machines and share hardware resources between them. Your physical servers are referred to as hosts. The virtual machines run guest operating systems.
A new version — ESXi — is also available. This preinstalled version can be configured by non-technical people via menus at boot-up. This version supports everything that the ESX supports, but it lacks a Service Console. This version is designed for remote deployment and management. And did I mention that it runs on a chip? You don’t even need any hard disks in your ESXi server.
VMware Virtual SMP: Virtual SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) enables a virtual machine to use up to four physical processors simultaneously. To benefit from multiple virtual CPUs, your operating system and application need to support SMP. However, VMware is very good at scheduling resources and you should only use multiple virtual processors if you can prove a performance increase.
VMware VMFS: Virtual Machine File System is a file system that allows multiple ESX hosts to access the same data storage concurrently. This allows any host to run any virtual machine and provides the ability to switch between hosts on the fly using VMotion.
VMware VMotion:VMotion
