Monday, December 10, 2007

VMware ESX 3.5 Released Today





VMWARE ESX Server 3.5 was released today: 12/10/2007.

VMware ESX Server 3.5
Latest Version: 3.5 12/10/2007 Build: 64607 Release Notes

ESX 3.5 Server is a major release that will deliver several new features.

As I see it, Storage Vmotion is the largest feature, however it's not included in these downloads and must be downloaded as a separate component. Migrations using Storage VMotion must be administered through the Remote Command Line Interface (Remote CLI), which is available for download here.












Here's a short list of Vmware ESX 3.5 New Features



Storage VMotion
InfiniBand network cards
10Gbit Ethernet network cards
Update Manager
SATA storage devices
Swapfiles-less VMotion
200 hosts and 2000 virtual machines
128GB RAM per host 64GB RAM per virtual machine
AMD Rapid Virtualization Indexing
para-virtualized Linux guest OSes
Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)





1 comment:

JC said...

Dan,

We use FC San for ESX, about 100 VMs on 5 hosts, starting to think about VDI, which might mean several hundred more. I was intrigued when I ran across your comments on NFS for ESX, but now, with storage vmotion in 3.5 and live VM migrations to new LUNs, curious if you think this reduces attractiveness of NFS vs. VMFS and LUNs. Seems like its still easier to resize NAS volumes if space is the issue (at least with netapps), but storage vmotion appears to bring the advantage of live migrations, if migration to new raid is the goal (though we really don't migrate very often). Guess question is whether you think live LUN sizing and migration is a big enough deal to trump other NFS benefits you've seen, especially since would seem easy/quick enough to move lots of VMs to new volumes using NFS (haven't done it tho). Thoughts? Thanks.