Vendors Aim for Easier Virtualization

With virtualization becoming more mainstream in the enterprise, businesses now are looking for easier and more flexible ways to deploy and manage their environments.

VMware, Cassatt and Surgient are rolling out offerings designed to address those demands. The moves come at a time when enterprises are beginning to move their virtualization environments from testing to production—VMware says that about 90 percent of their customers use virtualization in production environments.

According to a report in August from Enterprise Management Associates, almost three quarters of businesses surveyed are deploying virtualization in one form or another, and the market is growing by about 26 percent. In addition, less than 4 percent of those polled had no virtualization program in place or any plans for one.

Resource Library:

VMware on Oct. 2 is unveiling the latest versions of its Virtual Infrastructure and Converter products, with enhancements aimed at offering greater hardware interoperability, easier upgrades and less complex methods for creating virtual machines.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company is rolling out its Virtual Infrastructure 3, which includes the release of ESX Server 3.0.1 and VirtualCenter 2.0.1. Among the improvements in the products—which are available immediately—is full support of 64-bit operating systems. More software makers are building 64-bit applications, and virtualization will be important as companies begin to adopt the new applications, said Karthik Rau, senior director of infrastructure products and solutions at VMware.

"Virtualization is key in helping customers migrate from 32-bit to 64-bit computing," Rau said. "For the next few years, customers will have to manage both. [With virtualization], you dont have to worry about major migration."

In addition, using VMotion, customers can now upgrade to the new ESX Server versions through a single operation in the user interface.

VMware also is unveiling Converter 3, which makes it easier to create VMware virtual machines. Through this centralized product—which combines VMware P2V Assistant and Virtual Machine Importer into a single product—virtual machines can be created from servers running a host of Windows operating systems, including XP, Server 2003 and Vista, imported from older VMware virtual machine formats or converted from third-party formats such as Microsoft Virtual Server.

eWEEK Labs says VMware Server 1.0 is practically a must-have. Click here to read the review.

In addition, Converter 3—which is being beta tested and will be available within the next six months—allows physical-to-virtual conversion without having to shut down the physical server, and enables users to clone machines from a remote console.

IXIS Capital Markets started using VMware technology two years ago as a way of extending the life of its data center while a new facility was being built, said Mornay Van Der Walt, vice president and systems architect at the New York-based company.

"We were running out of space, power and cooling," said Van Der Walt, who beta tested Virtual Infrastructure 3. "We were able to prove that the combination of [IBM] blade technology and virtualization would allow us to use our data center while building another data center in New Jersey."

Upgrading to Virtual Infrastructure 3 will enable the company to continue its consolidation initiative by increasing the amount of memory in virtual machines to 16GB, and the ability to upgrade while still running the physical machine will save time, he said.

Next Page: Cassatt goes Xen.