Today VMware has released ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 3.

In the release notes I found the following changes:

• Increased number of vCPUs per core limit (from 8 to 20);
• New supported servers, NICs and storage I/O controllers;
• New supported Guest Operating Systems.

Besides that there are many improvements and bug fixes.

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VMware has a couple of nice podcasts which give you some insight in their products. These podcast are already avaiable for some time but I wouldn’t hold this from you.

Couple of podcast mentioned on the site:

• Introduction to Virtualization
• Top 4 differences between ESXi and Server 2
• Virtualize in Minutes with VMware ESXi
• Enhancing your Profitability with VMware

Nice listening material for a friday afternoon

http://www.vmware.com/resources/podcasts/

Yesterday I installed 5 new ESXi3.5 host at a client site, installed VirtualCenter and VMware Update Manager. I configured all hosts with storage, networking, licensing and ntp settings. All looked fine and ready to rock. One last action before starting with our test plan was to update all hosts to the latest patch level and that’s where the ‘fun‘ started.

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We had a small issue today with a virtual machine at one of our customer sites. We were unable to do a VMotion. The message we got was that there was an ISO image connected to the system.

Well, we tried all the standard things like being tenacious and clicking Yes on the question if I wanted to continue the VMotion (which failed ofcourse) and trying to edit it from within VirtualCenter. Unfortunately the option to edit was grayed out. Hmm..

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After the earlier news that Cisco was enlarging its stake in VMware now the news gets out that Intel sold half of its shares.

Intel disclosed that it had recently sold 1 million shares in the virtualization software maker and plans to sell another 3.75 million VMware shares on the open market. 500.000 of these shares were bought by Cisco. Another 500.000 were bought by EMC, VMware’s mother company.

After the rumors of Intel buying VMware from EMC one has to wonder what the future has in store for VMware. Also Cisco’s membership of Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program and the expansion of shares gives enough to speculate about.

Tired of all those security warnings when you logon to VirtualCenter?

Jason Boche has written a comprehensive post on SSL integration for VirtualCenter. After you follow his instructions you can use your AD integrated Certicate Authority as a trusted source.

Link to his guide: here

update
Link was invisible.

The talk of the town is that VMware is going to reduce their prices with 10% by next Monday, November 3rd.

This news comes from MicroScope.

As the articles correctly states this move counter the previous 10% price increase that VMware introduced September 1st, generating a lot of negative comments.

Microscope couldn’t receive an answer on how VMware can afford this while even its competitors like Citrix are raising up the prices by the same 10%.

This week VMware released VMware Infrastructure Management Assistant 1.0 (VIMA). VIMA is a free virtual machine on which VMware administrators can execute scripts and install agents that they would normally try to run on the console operating system (COS) like UPS agents, etc.

The VMware Infrastructure Management Assistant (VIMA) allows administrators and developers to run scripts and agents to manage ESX and ESXi systems.

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