Today I sat in on the first session of the day at VMworld 2007. There VMware’s CEO, Diane Green announced ESX 3i. In away this was both a big story and little story. So the big story is VMware’ ESX server “embedded” in memory to a server. In this architecture the Service Console has been stripped away leaving the ESX vmkernel stripped bare to its 32MB size. At the materials pickup (where you get your compliamentary bag and t-shirt) we also got little memory sticks with ESX 3i on them. This solution is being trumpted as thin-thin virtualisation. We were treated to a demo where we saw a Dell server power on a load “VMware Hypervisor” and the build value of ESX 3.5. Also shown was this new flavour of ESX capacity to speak to the underlying hardware’s management agent (be it HP SIM, IBM Director or Dell OpenManage). VMware promise that this release of ESX will need less patch management, and offers less possiblity to open security loopholes – because of the removal of the biggest security weakness – the Service Console. So that’s the big story.

The little story is – through the VMware rumour-mill we knew this was coming. Plus a couple of weeks ago Xen made a similiar pre-VMworld pre-announcement. Speaking to a number of guys in the hall who have had a chance to play with this release. It became clear that this is being pitched at customers who find ESX and its deployment a scary prospect. It doesn’t feel as if it is being marketed at the enterprize customers who use the fully-featured caffine rich ESX product. For a start the amount of hardware that the ESX 3i release can address is much less than the enterprise release. So it’s very much a “starter” edition. As with Xen’s announcement you can upgrade to enterprise release if you wish to. But if you add the price of ESX 3i to the upgrade costs – then most “serious” users would have gone to the enterprise release.

Still, it’s a “step in the right direction”. After all we all looking for quick ways of racking up a host and getting ESX on it with minimal effort. I myself have spent lots of time on this issue with my work on the UDA. But I could spent that valuable time on something else if ESX 3i had been around, and been fully-flavoured.

The later part of the session was with Intel and AMD banging on about their next generation of CPU i/o virtualisation. A few members of the audience began to filter out. Then came the thanks to the sponsers bit came. The hall began to hermoragge delegates. A little bit embarassingly the 1-minutes silence in rememberance of the day being Sept 11th was only observed by small number of people, and the cherup, cherup of a mobile phone….

Oh, last thing the guy opened the session – reminded me of the main guy out of “Heroes”. The chap who’s a dad is the evolutionary scientist!

Link:

http://www.vmware.com/vmworldnews/esx.html

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 at 11:59 pm and is filed under ESX. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.