Slashdot Mirror
VMware vSphere 5 Released
Hitting the front page for the first time, earlytime writes "VMware released vSphere 5 yesterday. After much publicity about its new licensing scheme, techies worldwide get to take the new release for a spin and see if all of the new features are worth the fuss. From the article: 'VMware vSphere 5 supports virtual machines (VMs) that are up to four times more powerful than previous versions — VMs can now be configured with up to 1 terabyte of memory and 32 virtual CPUs ... VMware vSphere 5 also introduces three key new flagship features — Auto-Deploy, Profile-Driven Storage and Storage DRS — that extend the platform's unique datacenter resource management capabilities, delivering intelligent policy management to support an automated "set it and forget it" approach to managing datacenter resources, including server deployment and storage management. Customers can define policies and establish the operating parameters, and VMware vSphere 5 does the rest.'"
I've used ESXi servers for the last year or so. In the last 6 months I moved to having a Macbook as my primary development machine, and use the ESXi servers for hosting some linux VMs. My major issue has been that the vSphere client is Windows only, which meant I had to start up a Windows VM on my mac, the launch the vSphere client to manage my ESXi server.
With 5.0 they ALMOST fixed this, just now quite there. They included a nice web interface for managing just about everything on the system. But you still need a browser plugin to show the Console for your VM. This plugin requires the .Net framework, so it's windows only. So, once again, I'll still need to use windows to manage my system if I want to see the console state of my VMs.
I still don't understand why VMware, a company who's main technology is all built on Linux, chose to use a Windows only framework when building their management UI.
Its not what it is, its something else.
I didn't see this kind of rage when the new Linux kernel release hit the front page of Slashdot on Sunday. How about when the Fedora 16 release was announced on Tuesday? Or when KDE Frameworks 5.0 development was announced? Must be tough to be so focused on only what matters to YOU and not what might be of interest to anyone else.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Indeed IBM was one of the pioneers (and still is) in virtualization. IBM still has VM (now called z/VM) and some shops use it to run Linux on zSeries (mainframe).
IBM also has some very impressive virtualization technology in their POWER series (combined pSeries and iSeries). Too bad they don't know how to market and compete as well as they should.
I'm ok with Slashdot stories as advertising... I guess... but if something like this is posted, at least include a direct link to the products page.
VMWare licensing practices are horrible. I have used Zimbra (paid version) for 6+ years. VMWare buys them from Yahoo and my bill triples. From $2500k/quarter to $2600/month.
VMware vSphere 5 supports virtual machines (VMs) that are up to four times more powerful than previous versions -- VMs can now be configured with up to 1 terabyte of memory and 32 virtual CPUs.
In Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Beta 3 (yes, it's a beta, still...), based in KVM: supporting up to 128 logical CPUs and 2TB memory for hosts, and up to 64 vCPUs and 2TB memory for guests