While waiting for the first keynote to start I figured that this would be as good a time as any to write a quick post.
I just got out of the first session of the morning. I decided to catch the VMware VI3 session which went over the new features of ESX 3.5.
It was a very good session packed with great info about the new features of VMware ESX 3.5 which came out a few months ago.
3.5 introduces the Storage Vmotion. It’s similar to the regular Vmotion which moves VMs from one host to another, but it’s designed to move a VMs storage from one disk (LUN, array, etc) to another disk within the same host without taking the VM down. In prior versions of VMware to move a VM from on disk to another you would need to power the machine down and then move the machine. It can now be done as a live operation. It does temporally double the memory and CPU requirements of the guest OS, and it is a CPU and disk intensive operation and should be done off hours, but it’s a great way to move from a full disk to an empty one.
Another great technology which I was introduced to is the VDM or Virtual Desktop Manager. As I understand this technology it allows you to take a single Windows XP guest OS, and allow many people to connect to it. The VDM places a connect pool in front of the Windows XP guest OS and as people connect to it, it takes a snap of the guest OS, and lets the new user use the snap. This allows many people to use a single Virtual Machine without increasing the amount of disk space required, and reducing the IO requirement of your Windows XP (or Vista) guests on the host.
As the Keynotes proceed I’ll try and go over what they are talking about.
Denny
