VMware Updates Virtualisation Software
VMware Updates Virtualisation Software
June 7th, 2006: VMware has rolled out a major upgrade Virtual Infrastructure 3.0, promising greater capacity planning, automation and resource management for virtual servers and storage in enterprise and small business environments alike.
The roll out marks the first major upgrade to the server virtualisation software in two years, and comes with several new tools. These include the distributed file system VMFS, Distributed Resource scheduler to automatically spread virtual machines across physical servers and consolidated backup to bring central backup to all virtual machines.
VMware says that the first generation of virtualisation enabled server partitioning through a hypervisor or hosted architecture, while the second generation added management, capacity planning, a physical to virtual assistant and other tools for consolidating production servers. Through its third generation, Infrastructure 3, the company says it can deliver “systems infrastructure capabilities for entire farms of servers and storage, independent of the application/operating system workloads and of the underlying hardware.”
“VMware Infrastructure 3 transforms the role of hardware and software so that the business can truly think in terms of deploying services on a pool of continuously available hardware resources,” claims Diane Greene, president of VMware. “Instead of server boxes specifically configured for a given operating system and application, there is now a set of applications mapped to a large pool of resources and the constraint of thinking about individual hardware components becomes an old fashioned concept.”
VMware says that Infrastructure 3 offers greater flexibility, higher utilisation of hardware and ease of management. This is achieved through central management and monitoring of virtual machines, and distributed resource optimisation to dynamically and intelligently allocate resources among virtual machines.
“VMware is turning the vision of the automated, self-optimizing data centre into reality,” says Ed Baldwin, senior network engineer for Enbridge Energy Company, Inc., a VMware Infrastructure 3 beta user. “Using VMware Infrastructure enterprise-wide since January 2005, Enbridge Energy has streamlined its IT infrastructure, saving more than $1 million in hardware costs.”
Price wise, the enterprise version of VMware Infrastructure 3 including all of the new technologies and ESX Server retails for U.S.$5,750 for two processors. Scaled down versions of VMware Infrastructure 3 such as the standard version run at U.S.$3,750 for two processors, while the starter version sells for U.S.$1,000.
Infrastructure 3 is expected to be available in June, 2006 from Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Hitachi, HP, IBM, NEC, Sun, Unisys, the VMware VIP network and VMware.
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