The next generation of VMware's free server virtualization product has hit public beta, and it's a doozy. So much has changed between the current version and what this beta promises that it's almost a completely different product. Briefly, these changes include A completely new Web-based UI Integration with VirtualCenter (though I haven't seen this yet) NFS datastores available from the UI Support for up to 8GB The next generation of VMware’s free server virtualization product has hit public beta, and it’s a doozy. So much has changed between the current version and what this beta promises that it’s almost a completely different product. Briefly, these changes include A completely new Web-based UI Integration with VirtualCenter (though I haven’t seen this yet) NFS datastores available from the UI Support for up to 8GB of RAM per virtual machine, up to two virtual SMP processors, and up to 64 virtual machines per host Enhanced OS support, including Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 Beta, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and Ubuntu 7.x I’ve only been running VMware Server 2 for a few hours on a Dell PowerEdge 2950, but already the differences stand in stark contrast to the older VMware 1.0.3 servers running in the lab. The UI is wholly Web-based and closely resembles the VirtualCenter UI. It’s also surprisingly responsive. One of the most interesting aspects of the new UI is that VM console interaction is available via a Firefox extension or ActiveX Control for IE. Yep, that’s right, when you open the UI in Firefox and hit a console, it prompts for the extension installation. In fact, you can even generate a specific URL to access the VM console from any browser. Pasting the URL into an e-mail, for example, will give the recipient the ability to just click and get to that specific console. Nice. Of course, this being beta software, I ran into problems getting the console to actually function on my brand-new install, and I’m sure that others will too — the fix was decidedly non-obvious. The symptoms were that nothing could connect to the VM consoles under Windows and Linux, IE and Firefox. The fix (on a CentOS 5/RHEL5 host) is to modify /etc/services to accurately reflect the port description that xinetd requires. Namely, replace ideafarm-chat with vmware-authd for TCP/902. Suddenly everything works, because xinetd can now start the service when requested.Another issue may be IPv6, which is enabled by default on newer RHEL releases. When running the vmware-config.pl script, there’s a new warning about this at the top, although the steps listed to disable IPv6 on Red Hat systems are inaccurate. For the record, to really disable IPv6, add alias net-pf-10 offalias ipv6 off to /etc/modprobe.conf and reboot. Also for the record, disabling IPv6 didn’t appear to help the problem, which is definitely related to the installer not modifying that file, or conversely, an incorrect xinetd parameter file, and I have seen some bizarre netstat output showing localhost listeners on several dozen ports, repeated dozens of times. I also had Firefox quit abruptly during the creation of a Windows VM. Beta, to be sure.Once I had the console up and running, it was surprisingly smooth, essentially feeling exactly like the VMware Server Console application used to manage the current version of VMware Server. A big downside is that the “fat” client is no longer supported.I can recall talking with a VMware product manager a year ago about VirtualCenter, VI3, and VMware’s Windows-only management server and clients. His comment was, “Well, if we had to do it all over again, we certainly wouldn’t be using .NET; it would be closer to AJAX.” It seems that VMware is doing it all over again, if this UI is showing us what might be on the way for ESX server management in the future. Adding NFS datastore mounting to the UI significantly simplifies the process of adding external storage to a VMware Server system. Prior to this, NFS mounts were done at the OS level, and VMware Server was essentially none the wiser. Now, NFS mounts are managed in the UI much like ESX datastores are managed in VirtualCenter. SAN support isn’t included though, so iSCSI volumes will still need to be mounted at the OS level.The increased CPU counts and RAM levels are substantial, but beg the question of why anyone would run such high-spec VMs under VMware Server and not ESX. I doubt anyone would in production, but in QA and lab environments, this could certainly come in handy.I’ll be poking at VMware Server 2 over the next few weeks, but given the fact that this is beta code, and I’ve already tripped over several relatively major issues, I won’t be putting anything valuable on this box. My first impressions are that this is certainly a step in the right direction for VMware, and shows a genuine focus on cross-platform support. Now if I could just run the VirtualCenter client on my Linux workstation… Technology Industry