VMware revamp broadens appeal

VMware unifies its virtualisation products into a single suite called Virtual Infrastructure (VI) 3

Server virtualisation specialist VMware has announced a major upgrade to its ESX Server and VirtualCenter product suites, plus a major cut in prices that will make the tools easier to justify for branch office and small business deployments.

At a company event in Boston , VMware announced that its range of virtualisation products has been unified into a single suite called Virtual Infrastructure (VI) 3.

The upgrade to ESX Server raises the maximum amount of RAM that can be used by a virtual machine (VM) from 3.5GB to 16GB, and increases the number of CPUs that can be used from two to four. It also enables ESX Server to run VMs stored on iSCSI and network-attached storage (NAS) devices, which should further increase the suite’s appeal to smaller IT operations.

New Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) capabilities in the VirtualCenter management console enable automatic load balancing across a group of ESX Server systems, while the addition of a high-availability (HA) feature lets the suite detect and automatically restart VMs that crash or halt.

The ability to make backups of running VMs is another feature that will be welcomed by many users. New Consolidated Backup software is designed to run on a standalone server and can use the snapshot feature of most iSCSI and SAN disk arrays to instantly make backups of running VMs. It can then copy those snapshots to disk or tape storage, or mount them so individual files can be backed up.

VMware president Diane Greene noted that this is the largest number of new products VMware had ever released simultaneously for system infrastructure.

“With VI3 we have taken an incredible amount of complexity out of the IT side of the enterprise, delivering huge cost savings and full freedom of choice,” Greene said. “And all this while increasing the service levels and robustness.”

Prices for the base ESX Server product have been cut from $5,000 (£2,700) per two CPUs to $1,000 (£540) for the VI Starter Edition, which includes the VirtualCenter that was previously sold separately. VI Standard Edition adds support for SAN-based storage and for VMs that use symmetric multi-processing, at a cost of $3,750 (£2,030), while VI Enterprise Edition is priced at $5,750, (£3,110) and adds DRS, HA and Consolidated Backup to the other products’ features.

Jeff Hunter, a consultant with US-based Nationwide Insurance, said that DRS and HA are the two main additions that businesses have been asking for. “companies want to make sure there is no loss in performance by going to a virtual machine, and they’re also concerned about having so many VMs on one server. What happens if that host drops?” he said. The HA and DRS features address those concerns, Hunter added.

Hunter also welcomed the price cuts and said they would make it easier to roll out virtualisation to branch offices. He also expected the Consolidated Backup tool to make it much simpler to create file-based backups.

John Phelps of analyst Gartner also applauded the updates, and said the new tools would increase the appeal of virtualisation. But he warned that there are still a few high-end applications that are unsuitable for virtualisation, usually because they make too many I/O calls to be virtualised properly.

‹ Virtual revelation, Leader, p12