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You arrived at the weblog of Geert Baeke. I am a technology consultant for a company called Xylos (Belgium). I mostly work with Microsoft technologies such as Windows, Active Directory, Exchange, Sharepoint, MSCS, and more. I am also actively busy with VMware's products, focussing on VMware ESX.

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VMware: ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5

by rastix on Wed 12 Dec 2007 05:05 PM CET | Permanent Link | Cosmos

The release of ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 brings a lot of interesting features. A good overview can be found in the release notes and more information in a what's new document.

Some of the changes I like in this release are:

Integration of tools like Guided Consolidation and VMware Converter in the VI Client.
Image customization of 64-bit guests. This is probably still based on the sysprep format for Windows Server 2003 and earlier. Remember that Vista and Windows Server 2008 use a different format (xml-based).
Provisioning across datacenters. In previous versions, you had to have templates in each datacenter.
Datastore browser that supports file sharing between hosts. You will be able to just cut and paste files between ESX hosts. Seems like a basic feature to have but in the past you had to do this from the console.
Support for 256GB of RAM in the ESX host and 64GB of RAM for a guest. Interesting but I doubt there will be many customers who need more than 16GB for a guest. Gotta run the race though. ;-)
Lockdown mode: the ability to prohibit management of a host when it is already managed by VirtualCenter.
Limit the amount of remote console connections.

For our customers, the features of most interest will probably be:

Update Manager: provides a patching solution for ESX hosts and (some) guests. This includes offline patching. Microsoft is also working on an offline patching solution with codename "Himalaya". See virtualization.info for more information. It will be interesting to see how the two stack up to eachother.
Storage VMotion: the ability to migrate virtual machines from one LUN to another without downtime. The migration needs to be done on the same host. You just present the source and target LUN and off you go.
VMware Converter integration into VI Client: makes it easier to do V2V and P2V right from VI Client and also allows customers that use VCB to restore backed up virtual machines right from VI Client.

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Re: VMware: ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5

by Erik Slapp on Tue 18 Mar 2008 04:35 PM CET | Permanent Link

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Erik Slapp
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