Posted by: Pete Pickerill on Jun 27, 2008
Even though it’s been available for
a few months, I only recently had time to check out the latest and greatest free virtualization offering from VMWare. I haven’t run it through the wringer completely, but from what I’ve seen there are several new features and improvements that will definitely hasten the upgrade process in our test environment once it clears Beta. Here’s what I like so far:
- A vastly better web console. The console obviously came under some major scrutiny. The 1.0 version wasn’t unusable, but it wasn’t as feature rich and intuitive as the 2.0 console. Everything you need to manage your virtual machines is easily accessible in a clean web app.
- More detailed event reporting. This helps you keep track of changes made to your virtual machines. It also helps you find who started, stopped, or reverted your virtual machines. So now instead of cursing the Void when a VM is reverted out from under you and you lose weeks of unsaved test data, you can find the culprit and break their coffee cup or mess with their chair settings late at night when no one else is around.
- If you are not a late night saboteur and would rather avoid the situation altogether, virtual machine permissions are a lot easier to manage in this release.
- Instead of assigning a single ‘Default Virtual Machine Location’ as you do in 1.0, you organize your virtual machines in one or more datastores. You can then set access permissions on your datastore to keep others from interfering with your diabolical machinations…or software development.
- Virtual Machine memory allocation ceiling has more than doubled. 1.0 capped per virtual machine memory allocation at less than 4 GB. 2.0 bumps this up to 8 GB as long as you have the memory to spare. This is a very big deal for anyone that plans on running multiple virtual machines hosting WebSphere Portal.
- Updates to the VIX API. 2.0 includes support for an updated API (VIX 1.5) with some exciting new features. I am most anxious to get my hands on the Record and Playback features.
The only thing that I hoped was going to be available in 2.0 was support for multiple snapshots per virtual machine. This would make it a lot easier to switch between WebSphere and WebLogic patch levels when tracking down configuration bugs. All in all, I’m very pleased and excited about digging deeper.
In Vmware Server 2.0, Virtualization
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