VMware
Yesterday a representative from one of VMware’s reseller’s came over to FreshMinds to give a demonstration of their new Virtual Infrastructure 3 suite.
I am seriously impressed with it.
Just to give people an idea of what it does, and to quote VMware themselves:
“VI3 allows multiple unmodified operating systems and their applications to run independently in virtual machines while sharing physical resources.”
And it does that very very well indeed. It seems that VMware have created a suite of tools that will not just impress the systems administrator with what they can do, they will also make his life an awful lot easier to boot. VMotion is a prime example of this – allowing virtual machines to be seamlessly shifted between physical hosts with little to no visible effect on performance.
And they even provide a free version to get you started/hooked.
- VMware Player – a tool that lets you evaluate new or pre-release software contained in virtual machines, without any installation or configuration hassles. You can also share existing virtual machines with colleagues or friends—just use VMware Player to run any virtual machine
- VMware Server – VMware Server installs on any existing server hardware and partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines by abstracting processor, memory, storage and networking resources, giving greater hardware utilization and flexibility.
- VMware Converter – VMware Converter quickly converts Microsoft Windows based physical machines and third party image formats to VMware virtual machines.
All are simple to use – VMware Server took me no longer than an hour to install, configure and perform a complete installation of Win2k3 – and they work ’straight out of the box’. Going to do some serious user testing over the next few weeks – i’m sure there’s much more praise to come!
