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VMware ESX Server 3.1.0 / VirtualCenter 2.1.0 Features list

Friday, 10 August 2007 by Michel Roth

VMware is hard at work on their next "minor" release of their flagship product: ESX Server. Virtualization.info has a neat post up detailing on all the new features this VMware ESX Server 3.1.0 ( and of course VirtualCenter 2.1.0) will have. Some of the neater new features as far as I'm concerned are Solid State Drive support (ESXLite) and the support for SATA storage devices and the new all-round update manager. I'm happy to quote the rest of the features:

Solid State Drive (SSD) boot support
As initially discovered last month, VMware will make available a special version of ESX Server (mentioned with terms like ESX Lite and Embedded ESX) for OEM vendors, to be installed into bootable Solid State storage devices (flash drives, etc.).

DMotion
In ESX Server 3.1 DMotion will be extended, allowing hot migration of running virtual machines between ESX 3.1 hosts through the Ethernet cable.

Patch management system for host and virtual machines(UpdateManager)
ESX Server 3.1 will finally introduce an automated patch management system called UpdateManager. This solution will be able to update both host itself and virtual machines (both Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux). UpdateManager will feature security backup before patching and automated rollback if something goes wrong.

VMware Consolidate Backup (VCB) and VMware Converter integration
VirtualCenter 2.1 will now allow restoring VCB images with an integrated version of VMware Converter.

Server consolidation advisor
VirtualCenter 2.1 will expose a server consolidation assistant able to analyze which physical machines should be converted in virtual ones, and where to move existing VMs among available hosts.

Guest OS disaster recovery capability
VirtualCenter 2.1 will be able to recognize a failure inside a virtual machine and restart it through VMware HA module.

Power saving capability (Distributed Power Management)
VirtualCenter 2.1 will introduce a new resources utilization analysis feature, able to verify when a physical host can be powered off, VMotion-ing its virtual machines on other hosts without impacting performances.

Support for Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP)
VirtualCenter 2.1 will be able to recognize and use CDP to discover physical and virtual network topologies.

Support for 10Gbit Ethernet network cards
Support for TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) network cards
Support for network load balancing algorithms
Support for 200 hosts and 2000 virtual machines
Support for 128GB RAM per host and for 64GB RAM per virtual machine
Support for SATA storage devices
Support for N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV)
Support for VCB over iSCSI SANs
Support for IPv6 in virtual networking

Read it all here.