Just when you thought the competition was catching up VMware does it again. Monday VMware announced the new features of the latest version of Virtual Infrastructure 3, which will be ESX 3.5 and VC 2.5. The new versions will be generally available later this year.
A description of the new features can be found in VMware’s news release
Here is the description of the new features from VMware’s announcement:
Virtualization platform enhancements help deliver new levels of performance, scalability and compatibility for running the most demanding workloads in virtual machines:
- Expanded storage and networking choices such as support for SATA local storage, 10 Gig Ethernet, and Infiniband expand storage and networking choices for virtual infrastructure
- Support for TCP Segment Offload and Jumbo frames reduce the CPU overhead associated with processing network I/O
- Support for hardware nested page tables such as in processor assists for memory virtualization
- Support for paravirtualized Linux guest operating systems enables higher levels of performance through virtualization-aware operating systems
- Support for virtual machines with 64GB of RAM and physical machines with up to 128GB of memory
New virtual infrastructure capabilities help deliver increased infrastructure availability and resilience:
- VMware Storage VMotion enables live migration of virtual machine disks from one data storage system to another with no disruption or downtime. VMware VMotion has become an indispensable tool for many infrastructure administrators to dynamically balance their server workloads and eliminate planned downtime for server maintenance. Storage VMotion extends VMotion to storage resources of a virtual machine, namely virtual disks. Using Storage VMotion, administrators can dynamically balance the storage workload and address performance bottlenecks by migrating virtual machine disks to the best available storage resource. Administrators can minimize service disruption previously incurred for upgrading storage arrays and free storage administrators to improve and manage the storage infrastructure without having to co-ordinate extensively with application and server owners.
- VMware Update Manager automates patch and update management for VMware ESX Server hosts and virtual machines. Update Manager addresses one of the most significant pain points for every IT department: tracking patch levels and manually applying the latest security/bug fixes. Patching of offline virtual machines enforces higher levels of patch standards compliance than physical environments. Integration with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) enables zero-downtime VMware ESX Server host patching capabilities.
New virtual infrastructure management solutions help deliver increased automation for streamlined managed of IT environments.
- VMware Distributed Power Management is an experimental feature that reduces power consumption in the data center through intelligent workload balancing. Working in conjunction with VMware DRS, Distributed Power Management is designed to automatically power off servers not currently needed in order to meet service levels, and automatically power on servers as demand for compute resources increases.
- VMware Guided Consolidation, a feature of VMware VirtualCenter enables companies to get started with server consolidation in a step-by-step tutorial fashion. A wizard discovers physical servers, identifies consolidation candidates, converts them to virtual machines, and leveraging intelligently places them onto the best VMware ESX Server or VMware Server hosts. Guided Consolidation helps to make the consolidation process quick and easy for users with little knowledge of virtualization.
