for 3i we have:
- compactness, 32 MB footprint
- architecture only, no installation needed
- wizard for deploying
- syslog stored in memory and tools to analyze it
- Distribuited Power Management (consolidate workload, place unneeded servers in standby and bring servers back online - minimizing power consumption and with no disruption of te VMs)
for 3.5 we have:
- Update manager (scan and remedies online and offline VMs and online ESX hosts, snapshot VMs before patching, integrated with DRS)
- Storage vMotion (FC only, zero downtime to VMs, LUN indipendent): this feature is not integrated with Virtual Infrastructure Client (...yet)
- HA now support up to 32 hosts cluster, with proactive cluster confcheck. As experimental feature there is individual VM failure monitoring
- VCB now support backup on iSCSI, NAS and local storage; you can use a virtual machine to run VCB and use Vmware Converter to restore the VMs.
- New OS support: Vista and Ubuntu
- up to 64 GByte of memory per VM and up to 256 GByte of RAM per host
- support for ethernet up to 10 GBit and Infiniband
There are a lot of benefit in application performance due to:
- Paravirtualization (now just for Linux, paravirt-ops with kernel > 2.6.21) that make guest OS virtualization aware: the major benefit are on large database, multiprocess applications, file server and web server because of net and disk I/O and context switching are better managed
- Large memory pages
- Network support for TCP segmentation Offload (reduce CPU overhead) and Jumbo Frames (with Jumbo Frame hardware enabled) with benefits on backup over lan, webserver, Citrix server and iSCSI
\mf
