VMware updates Infrastructure Suite

VMware has today made an initial release candidate of the next iteration of its Infrastructure Suite product, which will be released generally before the end of the year.

VMware Infrastructure Suite 3.5 will be initially available to customers who bought version 3 released last summer and includes improvements the vendor says will increase the availability, management and performance of virtualised environments.

Version 3.5 targets performance enhancements by supporting up to 128GB of physical memory and 64GB of virtual memory for running applications, for example. And support for SATA local storage, 10Gb Ethernet and Infiniband expand storage and networking choices for running a virtual infrastructure.

Raghu Raghuram, VMware vice president of products and services told IT PRO these increases in memory capacity had been made for those 60 per cent of customers who run live line-of-business applications or the 50 per cent who run databases in virtual environments.

"With version 3.5 we are sharing our latest innovations with our version 3 customers," he said.

He also highlighted enhancements to the VMware Storage VMotion tool, which will enable live migration of machine disks between storage systems to reduce maintenance disruption or downtime.

And the new VMware Update Manager tool can be used to establish a baseline for administrators before applying patches and updates and enable offline patch testing.

In addition, version 3.5 introduces VMware Distributed Power Management as an experimental feature that reduces power consumption by enabling intelligent workload balancing. Working in conjunction with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler, Distributed Power Management is designed to automatically power off or on servers as and when they are needed.

And the VMware Guided Consolidation feature that forms part of VMware VirtualCentre introduces a wizard for discovering physical servers, identifying consolidation candidates and converting them to virtual machines.

As well as introducing new features, VMware has also announced new pricing structures designed to get midsized and smaller organisations to adopt virtualisation. For example, the VMware Infrastructure Foundation Acceleration Kit includes VirtualCentre Foundation and VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation for 6 processors and management functionality for 3 nodes at a list price of $2,995 (£1,467).

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