VMTN Top News

We're pleased to announce the general availability of VMware Infrastructure 3 version 3.5, including ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5.

What's New

With this release of VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware innovations reinforce three driving factors of virtualization adoption that continue to make VMware Infrastructure the virtualization platform of choice for datacenters of all sizes and across all industries:

• Effective Datacenter Management
• Mainframe-class Reliability and Availability
• Platform for any Operating System, Application, or Hardware

Effective Datacenter Management

• Guided Consolidation—Guided Consolidation, an enhancement to VMware VirtualCenter, guides new virtualization users through the consolidation process in a wizard-based, tutorial-like fashion. Guided Consolidation leverages capacity planning capabilities to discover physical systems and analyze them. Integrated conversion functionality transforms these physical systems into virtual machines and intelligently places them on the most appropriate VMware ESX Server hosts.
• VMware Converter Enterprise integration—VirtualCenter 2.5 provides support for integrated Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) and Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) migrations. This supports scheduled and scripted conversions, Microsoft Windows Vista conversions, and restoration of virtual disk images that are backed up using VCB, from within the VI Client.
• VMware Distributed Power Management (experimental)—VMware DPM reduces power consumption by intelligently balancing a datacenter's workload. VMware DPM, which is part of VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler, automatically powers off servers whose resources are not immediately required and returns power to these servers when the demand for compute resources increases again.
• Image Customization for 64-bit guest operating systems—Image customization provides administrators with the ability to customize the identity and network settings of a virtual machine's guest operating system during virtual machine deployment from templates.
• Provisioning across datacenters—VirtualCenter 2.5 allows you to provision virtual machines across datacenters. As a result, VMware Infrastructure administrators can now clone a virtual machine on one datacenter to another datacenter.
• Batch installation of VMware Tools—VirtualCenter 2.5 provides support for batch installations of VMware Tools so that VMware Tools can now be updated for selected groups of virtual machines.
• Datastore browser—This release of VMware Infrastructure 3 supports file sharing across ESX Server hosts (ESX Server 3.5 or ESX Server 3i) managed by the same VirtualCenter Server.
• Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)—The Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) is a virtual machine distribution format that supports sharing of virtual machines between products and organizations. VMware Infrastructure Client version 2.5 allows you to import and generate virtual machines in OVF format through the File > Virtual Appliance > Import/Export menu items.

Mainframe-class Reliability and Availability

• VMware Storage VMotion—Storage VMotion allows IT administrators to minimize service disruption due to planned storage downtime previously incurred for rebalancing or retiring storage arrays. Storage VMotion simplifies array migration and upgrade tasks and reduces I/O bottlenecks by moving virtual machines to the best available storage resource in your environment. Migrations using Storage VMotion must be administered through the Remote Command Line Interface (Remote CLI), which is available for download at the following location: http://www.vmware.com/download/download.do?downloadGroup=VI-RCLI.
• VMware Update Manager—Update Manager automates patch and update management for ESX Server hosts and select Microsoft and Linux virtual machines.
• VMware High Availability enhancements—Enhanced high availability provides experimental support for monitoring individual virtual machine failures. VMware HA can now be set up to either restart the failed virtual machine or send a notification to the administrator.
• VMware VMotion with local swap files—VMware Infrastructure 3 now allows swap files to be stored on local storage while still facilitating VMotion migrations for these virtual machines.
• VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) enhancements—The VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) framework has the following enhancements:
  • iSCSI Storage—The VCB framework now supports backing up of virtual machines directly from iSCSI storage. Previously, the VCB proxy was only supported with Fibre Channel SAN storage.
  • Integration in Converter—VMware Converter has the ability to restore virtual machine image backups created through the VCB framework. Now that Converter is integrated into VirtualCenter 2.5, you can perform image restores directly through the VI Client.

  For details on many improvements and enhancements that this release of Consolidated Backup offers, see the VMware Consolidated Backup 1.1 Release Notes.

Platform for any Operating System, Application, or Hardware

• Management of up to 200 hosts and 2000 virtual machines—VirtualCenter 2.5 can manage many more hosts and virtual machines than previous releases, scaling the manageability of the virtual datacenter to up to 200 hosts and 2000 virtual machines.
• Large memory support for both ESX Server hosts and virtual machines—ESX Server 3.5 supports 256GB of physical memory and virtual machines with 64GB of RAM.
• ESX Server host support for up to 32 logical processors— ESX Server 3.5 fully supports systems with up to 32 logical processors. Systems with up to 64 logical processors are supported experimentally.
• SATA support—ESX Server 3.5 supports selected SATA devices connected to dual SAS/SATA controllers.
• 10 Gigabit Ethernet support—Neterion and NetXen 10 Gigabit Ethernet NIC cards are supported in ESX Server 3.5.
• N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) support—ESX Server 3.5 introduces support for NPIV for Fibre Channel SANs. Each virtual machine can now have its own World Wide Port Name (WWPN).
• Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) support—This release of VMware Infrastructure 3 incorporates support for CDP to help IT administrators better troubleshoot and monitor Cisco-based environments from within VirtualCenter 2.5 and the VI Client. CDP allows VMware Infrastructure administrators to know which Cisco switch port is connected to each virtual switch uplink (that is, each physical NIC).
• Paravirtualized guest operating system support with VMI 3.0—ESX Server 3.5 supports paravirtualized guest operating systems that conform to the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) 3.0. VMI is an open paravirtualization interface developed by VMware in collaboration with the Linux community (VMI was integrated into the mainline Linux kernel in version 2.6.22).
• Large page size—In ESX Server 3.5, the VMkernel can now allocate 2MB pages to the guest operating system.
• Enhanced VMXNET—Enhanced VMXNET is the next version of VMware's paravirtulized virtual networking device for guest operating systems. Enhanced VMXNET includes several new networking I/O performance improvements including support for TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) and jumbo frames.
• TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO)—TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) improves networking I/O performance by reducing the CPU overhead involved with sending large amounts of TCP traffic.
• Jumbo frames—Jumbo frames allow ESX Server 3.5 to send larger frames out onto the physical network. The network must support jumbo frames (end-to-end) for jumbo frames to be effective.
• NetQueue Support—VMware supports NetQueue, a performance technology that significantly improves performance in 10 Gigabit Ethernet virtual environments.
• Intel I/O Acceleration Technology (IOATv1) support (experimental)—ESX Server 3.5 provides experimental support for IOATv1.
• InfiniBand—As a result of the VMware Community Source co-development effort with Mellanox Technologies, ESX Server 3.5 is compatible with InfiniBand Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) from Mellanox Technologies. Support for this feature is provided by Mellanox Technologies as part of the VMware Third Party Hardware and Software Support Policy.
• Round-robin load balancing (experimental)—ESX Server 3.5 enhances native load balancing by providing experimental support for round-robin load balancing of HBAs.

VMware Lab Manager 2.5.1 is now available. Improvements include:

• More granular user control. Ability for the administrator to allow or disallow users from template usage and actions that can strongly impact shared storage.
• Improved administrator controls. Administrators can now change ownership of items, direct administrator emails to the appropriate users or email alias, and test SMTP.
• IP address savings.  Ease consumption of IP addresses when fence NATting is not required.
• Longer template names. Template names can now be more verbose.
• Improved storage management. Improvements to storage usage reports.
• Swapping ISO images. Ease installs by allowing ISO images to be swapped faster.
• All interim patches. Lab Manager 2.5.1 rolls up all interim patch releases, including:
  
  • Templates are not restricted to 4Gb memory footprint
  • Better handling of ESX and VMFS-3 limitations
  • More scalable LDAP implementation
  • Improved email filtering

Converter 3.0.2 Update 1 is now available. It contains bug fixes described in Resolved Issues and a known issue described in Known Issues.

Patches for ESX Server 3.0.x are now available: ESX Server 3.0.2 (1 Critical, 1 Security, and 4 General Patches), ESX Server 3.0.1 (1 Critical, 5 General Patches) , and ESX Server 3.0.0 (2 General Patches)

ESX 2.5.5 Upgrade Patch 2 and ESX 2.5.4 Upgrade Patch 13 are also now available.

Patches for ESX Server 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 are now available. The patches include both a Critical Patch and several General Patches.

• November 15 patches for ESX Server 3.0.2
• November 15 patches for ESX Server 3.0.1

VMware Server 2.0 Beta is now available. See the release notes and beta community for more information.

New features and enhancements in the VMware Server Beta 1 release:

• Web-based management interface: A new Web-based user interface provides a simple, flexible, intuitive and productive way for you to manage your virtual machines.
• Expanded operating system support: VMware Server now supports Windows Vista Business Edition and Ultimate Edition (guest only), Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn Server Beta 3), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ubuntu 7.1, among others.
• Greater scalability: Take full advantage of high-end hardware with support for up to 8GB of RAM per virtual machine, up to two virtual SMP (vSMP) processors and up to 64 virtual machines per host.
• 64-bit guest operating system support: Run high-performance operating systems in virtual machines with support for Intel EM64T VT-enabled processors and AMD64 processors with segmentation support.
• Support for VIX API 1.2: This feature provides a programming interface for automating virtual machine and guest operations.
• Support for Virtual Machine Interface (VMI): This feature enables transparent paravirtualization, in which a single binary version of the operating system can run either on native hardware or in paravirtualized mode.
• Support for USB 2.0 devices: Transfer data at faster data rates from USB 2.0 devices.

VMware VIX API 1.1.2 has been released for VMware Workstation 6.0.x and VMware Server 1.0.x. The VIX API allows users to write scripts and programs to automate virtual machine operations. For more information, see the VIX API Documentation and  Automation API Community.

VMware VIX API 1.2 for VMware Server 2.0 Beta is also available. See the VIX 1.2 release notes for more information.

VIX version compatibility is as follows:

Fusion 1.1 has been released. New in this release are over 25 new and improved features since VMware Fusion 1.0 including support for Mac OS X Leopard, Microsoft Vista in Boot Camp virtual machines, experimental support for DirectX 9.0 (without shaders) 3D graphics, localized French, German, and Japanese versions, and more. Download the free VMware Fusion 1.1 at http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/

VMware Importer beta imports Parallels Desktop for Mac 2.5 and 3.0 virtual machines running Windows 2000 or later. Just download VMware Importer, then drag your Parallels virtual machine onto VMware Importer and click Convert. For more information and to download, go to: http://www.vmware.com/download/fusion/importer_tool.html

For more information, visit the Fusion page and the Fusion Community.

VMware VirtualCenter 2.0.2 Update 2 is now available. From the release notes:

VirtualCenter 2.0.2 Update 2 release includes all the fixes from the VirtualCenter 2.0.2 Update 1 release and also includes fixes for certain globalization issues. These globalization fixes are primarily for the Japanese and German releases of VirtualCenter.

This release is intended for any customer who is installing the English version of VirtualCenter on a non-English operating system. Customers using the English version of VirtualCenter on an English operating system can upgrade to either VirtualCenter 2.0.2 Update 1 or VirtualCenter 2.0.2 Update 2. Both of these Update releases cover the same set of resolved/known issues with the exception of the globalization fixes present in Update 2.

This maintenance release includes changes to VirtualCenter Management Server and VI Client software. If you upgrade a VirtualCenter Server host using this maintenance release, you must also upgrade all VI Client hosts. You can upgrade the Windows client hosts by downloading the software from an upgraded VirtualCenter Server host, or by selecting VI Client from the VirtualCenter installation startup page.

VMware ESX Server 2.5.5 Upgrade Patch 1 and VMware ESX Server 2.5.4 Upgrade Patch 12 are now available.