ESX 3.5

VMware Update 3 is out! Vizioncore will be releasing VRanger support for ESXi 3.5 soon!

Hi folks, VMware Update 3 is now out and it addresses quite a few outstanding issues. You can read about the resolved issues in the release notes here. With VMware Update 3 out now once again you should pay heed to proper patch procedures as I always recommend. Please apply the patch in a test lab environment and watch how it affects things.

After you have spent the time patching and testing in the lab you will eventually have an opportunity to deploy this to your production environment. Don’t deploy it to every single server, just deploy it to one ESX host, see how thtat goes and then start to deploying it to other ESX hosts. This way you have something to fail back to if something goes wrong. You can download the update here.

In other news, Vizioncore will be releasing a version of VRanger that supports backing up of virtual machines in ESXi 3.5 in the first quarter of 2009! This  is great news as currently there isn’t an easy way to do this. Right now the easiest way to back up an entire virtual machine while it’s running live is to be running the paid for versions of VMware as opposed to the free ESXi 3.5. With the release of VRanger for ESXi 3.5 next year this is going to make ESXi 3.5 an even more appealing solution to the budget concious IT administrator looking to dip their toe into the waters of virtualization.

-RP

Microsoft relaxes licensing around virtual mobility for 41 server applications

Hi folks, before when you had to move virtual machines from one server to another using technologies like vmotion you had to ensure you had a license for the server applications on both host physical servers. The only way you could move this was if you did it once every 90 days.

Microsoft has now announced that they have removed the 90 day restriction and are allowing moving of virtual machines between host physical servers for 41 server applications. They call it “Application Server License Mobility”.

This is great news for the virtual world and Microsoft has obviously done this only now due to Hyper-V. Like I said before, this competition can only be good for the consumer. When licensing expensive server application products this can save a significant amount of money in your IT budget!

You can read about this further at these links:

Microsoft Press Release regarding the relaxing of it’s license policy

Microsoft: Application Server License Mobility (word doc)

-Raj

VMWare to offer ESXi for Free

Hi folks, if you haven’t already heard the exciting news, VMWare is going to be offering their ESXi product for free starting July 28th! This is obviously being done to compete with Microsoft’s Hyper-V. This is great news in my opinion as it will really foster great competition between the two products and can only result in both companies putting out better products for the consumer in the long run. You can read more about it here in eWeek’s article.

 One of the questions I’ve received is what is ESXi 3.5 and how does it differ from VMWare’s other product ESX 3.5? The major difference is that ESXi 3.5 has a small footprint of only 32MB and it doesn’t have a service console like ESX 3.5 has. This means that a lot of agents (like backup agents) that rely on the service console to run will not work with ESXi 3.5. However as the product matures we will see more and more support for it. In the meantime you can still run backups as you normally would on a physical server. 

 Here is a link to a knowledge base article at VMWare that also explains some of the features that are not present in ESXi 3.5.

-RP