SBSC & MSP Buzz

New from VMware ESX

Check out the enhancements to VMware ESX in Version 3.5 just released from NDA today by VMware .  Did I mention Microsoft is just slightly behind in the race to deliver virtualization tools and platforms? 

VMware 3.5 will now allow you run 256 GB and guest memory up to 64 GB per VM

You can now have up to 32 nodes to provide for ultra high availability.   

VC will now manage up to 200 hosts.

Support for new guest OS include MS Server 2008, Vista, Red Hat Linux 5, Ubunta 7.04 and Vista with lots of 64 Bit support.

Network improvements (in vmxnet driver) include TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) (makes the NIC do the work of segmenting packets instead of the CPU), Jumbo Frames Support (imagine setting MTU for 9000), 10 Gigabit NIC support (in limited guest OSs) and increased support of InfiniBand (provides for NIC consolidation and improved network performance).

Nested Page Tables (NTP) support reduces overhead memory usage by using the hardware (Intel EPT and AMD NPT both support) to maintain the page tables.  Great for large database applications.

Paravirtualization Support - modify the OS to run better inside a VM.  This requires source code access or version control from the OS vendor.  Application vendors must also support the modified OS.

Large Memory Page Support now support 2MB memory pages on the guest OS instead of the traditional 4KB thus delivering higer performance for databases or Java machines.

NUMA Optimizations will deliver faster access to local memory for the VCPU when shifting NUMU nodes by prioritizing the pages migrating from guest memory.

Having just used VMware this past week to recover a customers server temporarily to a workstation I’m really looking forward to offering solid virtualization architecture to clients that wish to take advantage of what companies like VMware are delivering.  

If your an IT pro in SMB please take a few minutes out of each week to learn something new.  I see too many peers running with their heads down just trying to make a living.  Making a living today is fine but let’s make sure you skill set will provide for what tomorrow may require.