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VMware ESX 3.5 / VirtualCenter 2.5 Released

Tuesday, 11 December 2007 by Michel Roth

It's all over the web. VMware today released VMware ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5. Oh, and they also released VCB (VMware Consolidated Backup) 1.1 but not too many people seem to care about that.

VMware ESX 3.5 or more accurately VMware Infrastructure 3 version 3.5, has a lot of new features both in the technical aspect as in the non-technical. The non-technical is that they re-arranged their product suites, names and prices (major vendors must feel that they need to do that every once in a while to confuse us).

But the important part is of course the technical new features. Well, there's a truckload. Here are the most important ones as far as I am personally concerned (note the word personally).

SATA Support
ESX 3.5 (and 3i) will introduce support for SATA storage devices. This makes it a hell of a lot easier to test drive the product.

VMware Update Manager
This allows you to easily patch of ESX Server hosts and select Linux and Windows virtual machines. It automates snapshot creation before a VM is updated, enabling easier rollback, and works with both online and offline VMs.

Storage VMotion
This should enable real enterprise VMotion in that with this feature you can now move VMs between different VMFSes located on different SANs without downtime.

There's a LOT more to tell about VMware ESX 3.5 / VirtualCenter 2.5 to be told but I'n not going to do it. Read the official VMware documentation or read an interesting article by Mike Laverick on SearchServerVirtualization.com.