VMWare leaves Microsoft behind with new virtualisation technology

Stan Beer
Monday, 05 June 2006 21:43

Business IT - Technology

EMC subsidiary VMWare has widened the already considerable gap between itself and Microsoft in the virtualisation market, with the release of its next generation virtualisation software suite, VMware Infrastructure 3.

VMWare and its open source rival Xen already have profucts in the market based on hypervisor technology, which allow servers to run multiple operating systems in virtual machines on single servers, which maximises usage of normally underutitilised servers. Microsoft is not planning to have hypervisor technology on the market for at least another year.

According to VMWare, the first generation of virtualization for industry-standard systems provided server partitioning through a hypervisor or hosted architecture. The second generation added management, capacity planning, a physical to virtual assistant and other tools for consolidating production servers. The third generation, VMware Infrastructure 3, enables systems infrastructure capabilities for entire farms of servers and storage, independent of the application/operating system workloads and of the underlying hardware.

VMware Infrastructure 3 incorporates four new products -- VMware VMFS, a next generation Distributed File System; VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS); VMware High Availability (HA); and VMware Consolidated Backup. The suite is designed to deliver comprehensive virtualization, management, resource optimization, application availability and operational automation capabilities in an integrated offering.

With VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware claims to be ushering in a new era for data centers where industry-standard infrastructure farms can be managed as a shared utility and dynamically allocated to different business units or projects. New capacity can be added or removed based on business demand. Applications can be migrated automatically to available hardware resources. Customers will be able to automate their infrastructure and deploy virtualization pervasively across their entire environment.

"VMware Infrastructure 3 transforms the role of hardware and software so that the business can truly think in terms of deploying services on a pool of continuously available hardware resources," said Diane Greene, president of VMware. "Instead of server boxes specifically configured for a given operating system and application, there is now a set of applications mapped to a large pool of resources and the constraint of thinking about individual hardware components becomes an old-fashioned concept. We'll look back on it as the difficult way we used to do things."

While VMWare and the Xen Project forge head creating multiple operating system servers across a number of machhines, Microsoft has been caught napping in the area of virtualization, focussing on its Windows-based server products. Microsoft only just announced recently that it is bringing out a hypervisor product code named Viridian, which will not be available commercially until 2008.

VMware Infrastructure 3 will be available this month.