VMware Upgrade Will Double CPU Support, Automate Tasks

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October 17, 2005 (Computerworld) -- VMware Inc. plans to release new versions of its flagship server virtualization products in next year's first quarter, doubling the number of processors supported by its ESX Server software to four and adding a set of automation features.

The upgraded releases of ESX Server and VMware's VirtualCenter software, which are typically purchased together, are scheduled to be detailed this week at VMware's user conference in Las Vegas.

Brian Byun, vice president of products at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based subsidiary of EMC Corp., said last week that the new software will be able to monitor physical servers and automatically reallocate virtual machines to other systems in the event of any failures. That function, called the Distributed Availability Service, is designed to ensure that applications can continue to run without intervention by systems administrators.

Also included is a feature called Distributed Resource Scheduling, which is intended to improve system utilization by continuously balancing workloads, Byun said.

The upcoming ESX Server 3 and VirtualCenter 2 releases are in limited testing now and should be ready for wider beta tests later this year.

Virtual Opportunities

The four-way processor support and a planned increase in memory capacity to 16GB, up from 3.5GB, may allow some users to move resource-intensive applications to virtual machines.

That's something Doug Baer, a systems engineer at Desert Schools Federal Credit Union in Phoenix, is thinking about. Baer manages 152 physical servers, mostly dual-processor x86 machines, and he has virtualized many of his systems, which support about 2,000 end users. With the increased processor support in ESX, it may be possible to move the credit union's SQL Server database to a virtualized environment, Baer said.

Virtualizing SQL Server would also enable him to use the automated fail-over capabilities in VMware's new releases. "It will probably give us better disaster recovery for our SQL Server," Baer said. "With VMware, it's pretty much a file copy for disaster recovery versus having to rebuild a machine."

Increasing the support in ESX to four virtual CPUs "is a big deal for VMware customers that have reached the end of scalability on their current product," said Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst at IDC. He noted that although some virtualization vendors can support up to 16 processors, "very few applications would need more than two to four processors" at this point.

Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H., called the planned releases "a strong upgrade." Microsoft Corp. and the developers of the open-source Xen software are each trying to commoditize basic virtualization capabilities, he said. But "that's something they can only do over time, not immediately," he added. "VMware remains well in the lead."

VMware's Plans WHAT'S COMING: ESX Server 3 virtualization software, VirtualCenter 2 tools for managing virtual machine infrastructures. DELIVERY SCHEDULE: A public beta is due later this year. A commercial release is expected to be ready in Q1 of 2006. PRICING: Not finalized. ESX and VirtualCenter now start at $5,000; existing users on maintenance contracts can get new releases at no extra cost.

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