• White Papers |
• Bloggers |
• Video |
• Webcasts |
• Events |
• Solution Centers |
• Newsletters |
• Magazine |
• RSS

VMware Releases Next-Gen Virtualization Software

June 05, 2006 — CIO —

VMware this week will launch the first major upgrade of its flagship server virtualization software in nearly two years, along with several new tools aimed at wringing more savings out of enterprise data centers.

Virtualization in recent years has gained favor among enterprise IT administrators as a way to cut costs through server consolidation, and market research firm IDC estimates spending around server virtualization will increase to nearly US$15 billion worldwide by 2009.

But VMware says its latest arsenal of virtualization technologies goes beyond server consolidation to simplify IT operations throughout the data center.

VMware has integrated the new versions of its VMware ESX server virtualization and Virtual Center management software with several new tools aimed at providing such functionality. The launch of the new suite, collectively called VMware Infrastructure 3, marks the end of a beta program that began in October 2005 and involved some 6,400 beta testers.

At the core of the suite is the VMware ESX Server 3.0 server virtualization software, which boosts the software’s virtual symmetric multiprocessing capabilities to provide up to four virtual CPUs and 16GB of memory for each virtual machine. The extra power and memory will help IT administrators looking to virtualize larger enterprise applications, said users.

"We needed to run some Oracle and SQL databases that needed a little more horsepower than two CPUs, but we didn’t need anything like eight CPUs, and we needed a little more RAM than the 3.6GB provided before," said Edward Baldwin, senior network engineer for Enbridge Energy Company in Houston.

Baldwin, a beta tester of the software, said it has helped the company save at least $1.5 million in the past year.

"We have decreased our purchase of servers, and we’ve found big savings in less power consumption, less network ports, less SAN ports and less cooling in the cages. And we save each business unit money because when they need a server developed and deployed, we can do it at a lower price and a quicker rate," Baldwin said.

Among new features in ESX Server 3.0 are new power-management capabilities designed to orchestrate settings of the underlying hardware and optimize power supplied to the server. On the storage front, the latest release adds support for NAS and iSCSI storage, for virtualization of infrastructure using lower-cost storage, such as at remote branch offices.

VMware also added new enterprise storage virtualization capabilities with the addition of a distributed file system, called VMFS 3, that allows users to pool heterogenous storage arrays into virtual volumes.

 

Email

Print

Comments

Share [+]

Digg This

SlashDot

LinkedIn