Va-va-va-VMware!

VMware, Inc. representatives have announced the release of VMware Infrastructure 3, a third-generation infrastructure virtualization software suite that promises to empower enterprises and small businesses to optimize and manage their IT environments through virtualization. VMware PR explains that the first generation of virtualization for industry-standard systems provided server partitioning through a hypervisor or hosted architecture.

The second generation added management, capacity planning, a physical to virtual assistant and other tools for consolidating production servers. VMware Infrastructure 3 is dubbed “third generation,” for it enables systems infrastructure capabilities for entire farms of servers and storage, independent of the application / operating system workload and of the underlying hardware. VMware Infrastructure 3 is a suite featuring four new product: distributed file system VMware VMFS; VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler; VMware High Availability; and VMware Consolidated Backup.

The third generation builds upon the VMware ESX Server with Virtual SMP and VirtualCenter with VMotion technology. With VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware seeks to do no less than “usher in a new era for data centers where industry-standard infrastructure farms can be managed as a shared utility and dynamically allocated to different business units or projects.” VMware Inc. promises a truly full step forward with the possibility to add or remove capacity non-disruptively based on business demand, automatic migration of applications to available hardware resources, automatic overcoming of hardware failure with “minimal disruption,” protection to business data via production SLAs, and instant provisioning of applications regardless of operating system and hardware.

“The constraint of thinking about individual hardware components,” claims VMware president Diane Greene, “becomes an old-fashioned concept. We’ll look back on it as the difficult way we used to do things.” With the release of VMware Infrastructure 3 comes more pushing of VirtualCenter, which the program incorporates. Billed in press material as “the market-leading management product for virtualized environments for more than three years.”

The latest version of VirtualCenter boasts new capabilities including capability to handle three times the number of hosts and virtual machines; topology maps and centralized configuration of ESX Server hosts with concomitant drag-and-drop simplicity to the management of enterprise-wide virtualization environments; eliminate single points of hardware failure by automatically relocating and restarting virtual machines; providing data protection by offloading backup to a centralized server; and extended security controls. VMware Infrastructure 3 was beta tested from October 2005 by over 6,400 active participants.