Since 2001, VMware has provided the industry’s most popular and reliable hypervisor, which is now used by more than 120,000 customers. The ESXi hypervisor is now available at no cost to help all companies experience the benefits of virtualisation.

Built on the proven and mature technology found in the ESX hypervisor, ESXi extends this tradition with an OS independent architecture that minimises attack surface area. ESXi offers features, such as 4 virtual CPUs, 256GB hosts, and memory de-duplication, for running the most resource intensive applications. This allows ESXi to offer the highest consolidation ratios and thus the lowest TCO and cost per virtual machine. These features work equally well across Windows, Linux, NetWare, and Solaris.

ESXi can easily be enhanced to include the advanced capabilities of VMware Infrastructure 3, such as VirtualCenter management, Update Manager, Consolidated Backup, High Availability, VMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler and Distributed Power Management.

New features in Update 2 include:

ESX

• Windows Server 2008 guest support - customisations and MCS are not supported
• Storage VMotion - supports migration from one FC/iSCSI datastore to another
• Windows VSS quiescing for snapshots - supports file systems and applications (2003)
• Hot Virtual Extend - extend a virtual disk while virtual machines are running
• High Availability - adds full support for monitoring individual virtual machine failures
• Support for 192 vCPUs, 8Gb Fiber Channel HBAs, 10 GbE iSCSI, and 10 GbE NFS
• Support for Remote Command Line Interface (CLI) on ESX Server 3.5

VirtualCenter

• Enhanced VMotion compatibility - configures CPUs to be compatible with older servers
• VirtualCenter Alarms - monitors the health of individual system components
• Windows Single Sign-on - automatically authenticates using your current credentials
• Live Cloning of Virtual Machines - create clones of a powered-on virtual machine

Consolidated Backup

• SSPI Authentication - passwords no longer need to be stored as plain text in config.js
• Password Storage in Registry - rather than storing it in config.js
• Transport Mode "hotadd" - uses the ESX I/O stack to move data with greater efficiency
• Windows VSS quiescing - now uses VSS on ESX Server 3.5 Update 2 hosts

Guided Consolidation

• Filter discovered systems - by name, IP address, domain name or analysing status
• Manually add physical hosts - without waiting for systems to be auto-discovered
• Override recommendations - manually invoke the conversion wizard

Converter Enterprise

• Schedule an unlimited number of recurring P2V tasks
• Convert individual volumes on a single physical disk to separate virtual disks
• Remove all System Restore checkpoints in the target virtual machine
• Support for Microsoft Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems

To learn more

Attend the free Disaster Recovery workshop or call 01932 724009 to arrange a demonstration.