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VMware ESX Server 3.0 And VMware VirtualCenter 2.0 Beta 2 Released

Saturday, 18 February 2006 by Michel Roth

VMware ESX Server 3.0 And VMware VirtualCenter 2.0 have been released to 2700 (!) Beta testers. New features of these products are:

Guests
• Bigger guests: ESX Server 3.0 introduces 4-way Virtual SMP and support for up to 16GB RAM per virtual machine. This is up from today’s size of 2-way Virtual SMP and 3.6GB RAM per virtual machine, and it should let more of the higher-end server workloads "fit" in a VMware virtual machine.
• Performance: We've made improvements across the board with particularly targetted focus on larger databases, custom Linux applications, Citrix, and web servers. I'll go into more detail on this in the near future.
• Experimental support for 64-bit guests! Yes, on supported hardware, we'll enable 64-bit guests.More on this in a future entry!
• Experimental support for Solaris 10 (x86) guests!

Virtual Center 2.0
• Tighter control: VirtualCenter 2.0 offers better control over VMware ESX Server instances and virtual machines through improved inventory models, interactive topology views, and an upgraded graphical user interface that integrates ESX Server host management.
• Centralized license management: VirtualCenter 2.0 centralizes license management for greater deployment flexibility and easier license tracking.
• Fine-grain access controls and audit trails: VirtualCenter 2.0 offers configurable, tiered group definitions and finer-grain definition of access privileges. It also maintains an audit trail of all significant changes.

New Add On Features for ESX 3.0
• Distributed Availability Services enables high availability without the cost or complexity of clustering by detecting failed virtual machines and automatic ally restarting them on alternate ESX Server hosts.
• Distributed Resource Scheduling improves management and load balancing by automatically moving live virtual machine workloads across ESX Server hosts.
• VMware Consolidated Backup simplifies and accelerates backup with host-free, LAN-free, agentless backup of Windows virtual machines.

More hardware support:
We also want to enable our products to run on an even broader set of hardware. We're dramatically increasing our hardware compatibility list for this release. We're also adding support for both iSCSI and NAS (NFS) storage targets to our existing Fibre Channel support. These new forms of shared storage should enable the full use of virtual infrastructure in more cost-conscious parts of the organization.

Read it all here.