VMware Releases Update 2 for VI3

On July 25, VMware released Update 2 for VMware Infrastructure 3, ESX 3.5, and VirtualCenter 2.5. While there was no official press announcement or fanfare coming out of the VMware offices around this product update, many of the new features and enhancements being made available with Update 2 are quite significant.

With an already impressive list of supported guest operating systems, Update 2 expands on that list with some of the latest operating systems in use today. The new version adds support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter editions). Other guest operating systems now supported include Solaris10 U5 (both 32 and 64-bit editions), Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 (32 and 64-bit), and Ubuntu 8.04 (32 and 64-bit). The 32-bit versions of Ubuntu and Suse support the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) and hence are performance-optimized for VMware environments.

One of the problems or difficulties with VMware’s VMotion capability has been the issue with incompatibilities between processor types. Update 2 addresses this with Enhanced VMotion compatibility (EVC), which simplifies VMotion compatibility issues across CPU generations by automatically configuring server CPUs with Intel FlexMigration or AMD-V Extended Migration technologies to be compatible with older servers. Once EVC is enabled for a cluster in the VirtualCenter inventory, all hosts in that cluster are configured to ensure CPU compatibility for VMotion. VirtualCenter will not permit the addition of hosts which cannot be automatically configured to be compatible with those already in the EVC cluster.

For file system and storage updates, VMware has improved Storage VMotion support from a FC/iSCSI datastore to another FC/iSCSI datastore. VSS quiescing support has also been updated. When creating quiesced snapshot of Windows Server 2003 guests, both filesystem and application quiescing are now supported. And they’ve also added the ability to extend a virtual disk while the virtual machine is running — hot virtual extend support!

And if you needed more vCPUs per host, guess what? That’s been updated as well. VMware now supports increasing the maximum number of vCPUs per host to 192.

Other improved features include:

• VMware High Availability (HA) – VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 adds full support for monitoring individual virtual machine failures based on VMware tools heartbeats. This release also extends support for clusters containing mixed combinations of ESX and ESXi hosts and minimizes previous configuration dependencies on DNS.
• VirtualCenter Alarms – VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 extends support for alarms on the overall health of the server by considering the health of each of the individual system components such as memory and power supplies. Alarms can now be configured to trigger when host health degrades.
• Guided Consolidation Enhancements – Guided Consolidation now provides administrators with the ability to filter the list of discovered systems by computer name, IP address, domain name, or analyzing status. Administrators can also choose to explicitly add physical hosts for analysis, without waiting for systems to be auto-discovered by the Consolidation wizard. Systems can be manually added for analysis by specifying either a hostname or IP address. Multiple hostnames or IP addresses, separated by comma or semicolon delimiters, may also be specified for analysis. Systems can also be manually added for analysis by specifying an IP address range or by importing a file containing a list of hostnames or IP addresses that need to be analyzed for consolidation. Guided Consolidation also allows administrators to override the provided recommendations and manually invoke the conversion wizard.
• Live Cloning of Virtual Machines – VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 provides the ability of creating a clone of a powered-on virtual machine without any downtime to the running virtual machine. Therefore, administrators are no longer required to power off a virtual machine in order to create a clone of it.
• Windows Single Sign-on Support – You can now automatically authenticate to VirtualCenter using your current Windows domain login credentials on the local workstation, as long as the credentials are valid on the VirtualCenter server. This capability also supports logging in to Windows using Certificates and Smartcards. It can be used with the VI Client or the VI Remote CLI to ensure that scripts written using the VI Toolkits can take advantage of the Windows credentials of your current session to automatically connect to VirtualCenter.
• Plug-in Updates – This release of the VMware Infrastructure 3 software suite also includes an update to VMware Converter Enterprise and an update to VMware Update Manager.

VMware has had a very busy month with Diane Greene’s departure, the stock price falling, less than expected financial numbers, and growing competition. But since then, the company has also announced ESXi as a free hypervisor product, they continue to work toward releasing the next major release of ESX and VirtualCenter, and now they have an interim updated version of VI3 with Update 2.

You can find out more about Update 2 by going to VMware’s Web site.