Briefing: VMware ESX Server 3

VMware ESX Server 3
VMware, Inc.
Palo Alto, California
(650) 475-5000
http://www.vmware.com

VMware made some announcements in conjunction with their VMworld user conference this year, and since they were kind enough to brief me on the content in advance, I thought I'd pass on the highlights. Most significant, I think, is the news of a new version of ESX Server, currently in beta with general release targeted for first quarter 2006. As you may or may not recall, ESX Server is the high end of the VMware product line: it's a version of VMware that runs on the bare metal of your x86 system, and then allows you to load multiple virtual machines to run in a single physical computer. ESX Server lets you allocate specific levels of hardware resources such as CPU to individual virtual machines. Typically it's used along with two other VMware offerings: Virtual SMP, which lets you set up multi-processor VMs, and VirtualCenter, which provides management services for multiple ESX Server installations including the ability to move running virtual machines from one physical ESX Server to another.

The most exciting thing about the new version, I think, is a feature they're calling Distributed Availability Services. To use this, you store the actual bits of your VMs out on a SAN where they're visible to all of your ESX Servers. Then, if something goes wrong - say, a power supply explodes and one of your physical servers is reduced to a smoking heap of rubble (can you tell I've had hardware issues lately?) - Virtual Center steps in and automatically migrates the running virtual machine to another ESX Server in your installation. The second new capability is a thing called Distributed Resource Scheduling, which lets Virtual Center keep an eye on resource allocation on physical servers and automatically moves VMs around to meet resource commitments. Thus if one VM starts saturating a physical server (perhaps because huge batch process is running) it can automatically be moved to a less-busy server without operator intervention.

Taken together, these two features mean that you can pretty well stop considering your data center as a batch of servers and start considering it as a big pool of computing horsepower that you throw virtual machines at. When you run low on horsepower, plug in another machine, install ESX Server, hook it up to the SAN, tell Virtual Center it exists, and watch the load redistribute. Assuming they can ship this in a working state, it's a lovely idea.

Other changes to ESX Server include support for more physical hardware and the ability to create VMs with 4-way SMP and up to 16GB of RAM. At the same time, VMware announced a new set of automated server consolidation assessment services to help organizations determine how they can effectively and cost-efficiently deploy virtualization (using VMware products, of course) in their own data centers.

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

Published October 18, 2005