Here at Last - VMware vSphere

At last VMware have finally announced their successor to VI3 - welcome to vSphere and what an impressive technology stack it sports.

The next release is aimed across the whole spectrum of organisations from SMB to Enterprise and makes the premise of cloud technology feasible to all at an affordable price.

VMware vSphere for Small Businesses delivers two core options dependent on your needs as a business:

• VMware vSphere Essentials

HyperVisor, Patch Management, Management Agent, Management Server

• VMware vSphere Essentials Plus

HyperVisor, Patch Management, Management Agent, Management Server, High Availability and Data Protection

Designed especially for small IT environments with fewer than 20 physical servers, the VMware vSphere Essentials Editions deliver enterprise-class capabilities in a cost-effective solution package for organizations that want optimize and protect their IT assets with minimal up-front investment.

vSphere Essentials enables server consolidation and centralized provisioning, monitoring and management to deliver immediate hardware and operational cost-savings. vSphere Essentials Plus adds in additional features for maintaining business continuity in the face of hardware failures and data loss.

Each edition is a solution bundle that includes everything required to virtualise and centrally manage many application workloads on three physical servers running vSphere.

VMware vSphere for Medium and Enterprise size businesses delivers four options dependent on your needs as a business:

• Standard

HyperVisor, Management Agent, High Availability and Thin Provisioning

• Advanced

HyperVisor, Management Agent, High Availability, Thin Provisioning, Live Migration, Continuous Availability, Network Security Zoning, Data Protection

• Enterprise

HyperVisor, Management Agent, High Availability, Thin Provisioning, Live Migration, Continuous Availability, Network Security Zoning, Data Protection, Dynamic Resource Allocation, Power Management, Storage Live Migration

• Enterprise Plus

HyperVisor, Management Agent, High Availability, Thin Provisioning, Live Migration, Continuous Availability, Network Security Zoning, Data Protection, Dynamic Resource Allocation, Power Management, Storage Live Migration, Third Party Multipathing, Distributed Switch, Host Configuration Controls.

The New Cloud Architecture - vSphere

So a lot to take in there, and there is more to be found here at VMware, if you find yourself in either Manchester or Frimley on either 28th or 30th of April why not register for our vSphere event to understand what it means to your business.

Citrix's Project George open for Beta Testers

Citrix have made available to beta testers the next release of their free hypervisor, the project is called Project George and it is expected the final release will be XenServer 5.1 and has some interesting features:

• AD Integration - Who can access the XenServer Console and what can they do
• Workload Balancing - Similar to VMware DRS, to XenMotion the workloads to alternative hosts based upon a star rating
• LVHD - Fast cloning and snapshots and now supported across all SR types
• StorageLink Integration - CLI only support for a new StorageLink Gateway SR adding support for HP MSA, HP EVA, EMC Clariion and NetApp arrays
• Expanded guest O/S support.

Citrix Introduces XenConvert 2.0

This is currently in Beta release, and you can sign up here.

XenConvert is the P2V and V2V tool for XenServer deployments.

The new version wil import VMware virtual machines in both VMDK and OVF packages, and is agnostic to the virtualisation product that generated them.

Although not mentioned, it is expected that this will be a FoC tool to entice end users to migrate from alternative virtualisation platforms since the announcement of their FoC XenServer product.

VMware Release ESX 3.5/i Update 4

With the impending release of vSphere looming on the horizon, VMware have just released Update 4 for both ESX 3.5 and ESXi and includes:

• Support for Intel Xeon 5500 series CPUS
• Support for Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 11, Ubuntu 8.10 and Windows PE 2.0 as guest operating systems
• Support for new SATA Controllers
• Support for new NICS
• Support for new Storage Arrays
• Enhanced VMXNET driver for Windows XP and 2003
• Support for new management agents.

The question is when will vSphere be with us?