What to expect at VMworld: ESX 4.0 beta, Intel six-core CPUs, and maybe Cisco virtual switches

Posted by Alessandro Perilli   |   Friday, September 12, 2008   |   42 Comments

This year the VMworld US conference broken all records for a virtualization conference: 14,000 delegates.

In front of them the new CEO Paul Maritz may have a hard time explaining why the company co-founder and Chief Scientist, Mendel Rosenblum, resigned or why the Executive Vice President of R&D returned to Oracle after less than one year or why ESX 3.5 Update 2 was mistakenly timebombed.

But Maritz may have something serious to distract the audience: ESX 4.0.

The product is currently in private beta and just a small, selected list of testers can access it.
Nonetheless virtualization.info has a partial list of the new, remarkable features included in the first beta build:

  • 64bit kernel and console operating system (COS)
  • clustered VirtualCenter Servers
  • ESX hosts profile management
  • cross-hosts virtual networking
  • 8-way virtual SMP
  • virtual machines fault tolerance across multiple hosts (the famous Continuous Availability presented last year)
  • VMs and media library
  • alarms on physical hardware faults
  • access control on storage resources
  • configuration change tracking
  • full support for SATA local storage

We were informed that this is just a small list. And it seems already enough to keep the whole audience engaged for the entire event.

 

To help VMware in reducing to silence the rumor generated by Microsoft and its partners with the Monday launch of Hyper-V 1.0, Intel is expected to announce its six-core CPU, codename Dunnington (Xeon 7400), supported by the new ESX.

The new 45nm CPU will have a monolithic design and a much bigger cache (3MB Level 2 and a shared 16MB Level 3) to boost performance, Intel says close to 50% increase, and serve more virtual machines at the same time.


Last but not least, Cisco may have something really big to say to close any discussion. 
(please note that his last point is totally unconfirmed at the moment)

Over one year ago, in time for the the VMworld 2007, virtualization.info published an article about the upcoming release of 3rd parties virtual switches for VMware ESX.
Following the rumors from trusted sources, it seemed perfectly logical that Cisco would be interested in releasing a virtual version of its Catalyst that customers could plug into ESX to enhance the limited networking capabilities that VMware offers today.

So far nor Cisco neither other networking vendors ever released such virtual equipment, but just two days ago an interesting comment appeared on our one-year-old post:

Will be announced on sept 16th. It will run NX class software and will offer cross host virtualization. 

It may be just a rumor or a prediction but Cisco actually has a keynote scheduled for Sep. 16, and in the last period it acted in a pretty strange way.

We’d suggest to keep an eye open on them while at VMworld.

42 Comments

Anonymous Anonymous Friday, September 12, 2008 4:29:00 PM  
VMsafe will also be part in ESX 4
Anonymous Anonymous Friday, September 12, 2008 5:39:00 PM  
Most of the features actually look pretty ho hum.

ESX is FINALLY 64-BIT. Ok. Your competitors (Xen & Hyper-V) have been for a while.


What the heck is full SATA support? What doesn't it support now? Seems kinda weak.

Fault tolerance looks interesting but I wonder what the performance impact will be.

And how much is VMware charging for this upgrade?
Anonymous Anonymous Friday, September 12, 2008 8:07:00 PM  
What happened to being able to make configuration changes like adding memory to a VM on the fly? Other vendors have announced plans for this.
Anonymous Anonymous Friday, September 12, 2008 9:30:00 PM  
The article states that it is a small list which means that it is incomplete ergo it is not yet complete. Please forgo your whining until we get the whole skinny poncho.
Anonymous Anonymous Saturday, September 13, 2008 6:23:00 AM  
I have seen the full list of ESX 4.0 beta features, and the product sounds AMAZING...
Anonymous Anonymous Saturday, September 13, 2008 1:04:00 PM  
From what I have seen and heard from various people at Cisco it does look like the Virtual Switch announcement will finally come into play (of course this was supposed to happen last year at VMWorld '07). The Nexus makes sense since that is the consolidated Data Center product for FCoE, 10GB, etc...
Blogger Nawty Saturday, September 13, 2008 2:49:00 PM  
All of the features are not 'ho hum'. They are all evolutionary features that take the current top of the range hypervisor even that bit further.

Who cares if it wasn't entirely 64bit before, it outperforms everyone at the moment, this will only but increase that lead.

SATA support, yep, that's been missing, but again it's been slowly integrated to the point of stability, although that is something that should've been in ages go...

8 way smp, that's pretty awesome, as is cross host virtual networking!!!
Anonymous Anonymous Saturday, September 13, 2008 2:52:00 PM  
VMware looks amazing... for the 5% of the market who will buy it. Buh Bye Vmware, Hello HyperV.
Anonymous Anonymous Saturday, September 13, 2008 3:58:00 PM  
Uh yeah....Hello hyper V. You go play with the toys and let the grown ups talk shop. M'kay?
Anonymous Anonymous Saturday, September 13, 2008 5:52:00 PM  
Whatever. In the grand scheme of things VMware is a high end hypervisor that will increasingly be chosen only by the top 5% of the market. Reason: they are too expensive. They will remain a niche player while Microsoft takes the remaining 95% and VMware has to battle Citrix, SUN and Oracle for the top 5%.
Anonymous Anonymous Saturday, September 13, 2008 8:30:00 PM  
HyperV? Sounds like something that you need to treat with ritalin. Looks like the MS propaganda brigade is starting to infest here. Same old M.O.
Anonymous Anonymous Saturday, September 13, 2008 9:16:00 PM  
"Same old M.O."

Yup. Microsoft will make billions off the SMB market and infiltrate the high end over time.

VMware = Make millions off the high end and lose that over time.
Anonymous Anonymous Sunday, September 14, 2008 12:22:00 AM  
Perhaps you missed the newsflash where vmware released it's standalone for free like hyper-v? Yeah, it's going to cost more to make your environment truly fault tolerant(and the esx4.0 takes it to even higher planes of existance than before), but hyper v is not even able to vmotion yet. If you want crap, then you can tolerate hyper v...but for those of us that build decent infrastructure, there is only one choice....Vmware.
Anonymous Rohime Sunday, September 14, 2008 3:55:00 PM  
Virtual Switch is to be known as Nexus 1000.
Anonymous Anonymous Sunday, September 14, 2008 4:07:00 PM  
The virtualization religious war has begun. :)
Hyper-V = Microsoft
VMware = Linux
Plus ca change, c'est meme la chose.
Blogger SPEEDFIRE Sunday, September 14, 2008 5:49:00 PM  
Great news ! I've just post a news on what Cisco will probably bring at VMworld www.virtuanews.fr ( a french blog about virt")
Cisco will probably show DVN and DVS, for virtual management of switches
http://virtuanewsblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/en-vmworld-2008-what-to-expect-from.html
see you in Las Vegas, maybe !
Anonymous Malaysia VMware Monday, September 15, 2008 4:16:00 AM  
Edit any setting without downtime is the best.
Anonymous Anonymous Monday, September 15, 2008 6:29:00 AM  
"Perhaps you missed the newsflash where vmware released it's standalone for free like hyper-v?"

Didn't miss it. But I didn't plan on buying a dedicated server to test it out considering the limited type of hardware it runs on.

Hyper_v runs on more hardware.

I put it on my Dell XPS Workstation (which costs less than 1000$).
Anonymous Anonymous Monday, September 15, 2008 1:10:00 PM  
Oh yeah... sure... "it supports more hardware bla bla bla"

VMware's HCL have a lot of common REAL servers... hey, wait a minute...are you using a "workstation" as server? LOL - if you want to compare Hyper-V role with something, please, compare it with VMware Server 2 RC that runs on top of any commom linux distro or even Windows itself. Baremetal Hyper-V dont even exist yet...

And ESXi is free dude and have much more functionalities than your ONE-POINT-ZERO "Hyper-V workstation"... humpf.
Anonymous Anonymous Monday, September 15, 2008 1:30:00 PM  
more here http://www.vdi.co.nz/?p=77
Anonymous Anonymous Monday, September 15, 2008 1:47:00 PM  
Nexus Beta is open for registration at Cisco.

Hotplug CPU/Memory is availabe in the Beta.for those that wondered.

The list of enhancements and new features is very long and will get longer before GA.

Oh, and to Anonymous, good luck running Your fault tolerant Datacenter on Your Dell XPS WS
Anonymous Anonymous Monday, September 15, 2008 5:22:00 PM  
How can anyone knowingly choose Hyper-V over VMware, even with the cost factored in. They should be fired from their job. Not to mention a first gen ms product rushed out the door to try to grab marketshare? Ugh. You must be a top notch IT professional? Do you run Linksys switches too?
Anonymous Anonymous Monday, September 15, 2008 5:44:00 PM  
"Virtual Switch is to be known as Nexus 1000"

Very close. It will actually be known as Nexus 1000v.
Anonymous Anonymous Monday, September 15, 2008 10:14:00 PM  
"Hyper_v runs on more hardware."

Officially is the key word here.

Of the three machines I have ESXi running on right now, only one is on the HCL and even then it has an unsupported disk controller. It still works. This includes a Dell Dimension desktop purchased at Wal-Mart. I've also virtualized it (yea, what a laugh, virtualizing a hypervisor) in VMware Workstation which makes a great test platform for the higher end features that need more than one host.
Anonymous Anonymous Tuesday, September 16, 2008 1:10:00 PM  
Anyone out there who knows if ESX 4 will be able to do a host based mirror of VMFS volumes which are based on Fibre Channel Luns?
I guess that´s what many many people are waiting for.
Anonymous Anonymous Tuesday, September 16, 2008 3:23:00 PM  
"Hyper_v runs on more hardware"

VMWare Server runs on even more hardware than that...

We're talking about serious infrastructure, i.e. ESX server. Hyper_v is no where near free, as it requires the purchase of Windows Server.

In a prodominant Linux based virtualised world; Hyper_v definitely takes the back seat.
Anonymous Anonymous Wednesday, September 17, 2008 3:01:00 AM  
Probably wont do hostbased mirroring, as they have the SRM product built on top of sanbased mirrors.
Anonymous Rohime Wednesday, September 17, 2008 7:38:00 AM  
As reply to "Probably wont do hostbased mirroring, as they have the SRM product built on top of sanbased mirrors"

Don't forget that all SRM needs is an appropriately coded SRA. If you can get an SRA for any data replication service (even a host over IP based one) then SRM can be used for that replication service.
Anonymous Anonymous Tuesday, September 23, 2008 7:35:00 PM  
"good luck running Your fault tolerant Datacenter on Your Dell XPS WS"

Thanks. But I don't have a fault tolerant datacenter now. Can't afford it. But I might be able to afford one based on Hyper-V.


"Hyper_v is no where near free, as it requires the purchase of Windows Server."

Nope. Within a few days Hyper-V Server will be downloadable and free.

"They should be fired from their job."

Actually, people who squander 10s of thousands of dollars on an unnecessary product should be the first to go.
Anonymous Anonymous Tuesday, September 23, 2008 11:17:00 PM  
Had a good chuckle during lunch reading these comments. My suggestion... Choose the technologies that best fits your organizations needs and your technical personnal's experiences. My last and final comment/suggestion. You all must have nothing to do at your job if you have the time to rag this much on your choosen VM technology.
Anonymous Anonymous Friday, October 10, 2008 6:33:00 PM  
Hey mister Hyper-V micro$ salers did you really use ESXi or ESX 3.5 to make a comparison? Just check the time spend to install it, configure it, implement a cluster and manage your VM in graphical mode and in command mode. There is no possible comparison … Hey mister Citrix, how is you cluster … LOL!
Anonymous Jack of all VM Wednesday, October 22, 2008 11:27:00 PM  
How come no one ever mentions Virtual Iron, a real Xen based alternative to VMWare available right now and free to use for 1 server to test, in any of these discussions?
Anonymous Anonymous Sunday, November 30, 2008 9:54:00 PM  
If you run windows on VMware you still have to buy the OS.

Do all of your servers require 24/7 high availability? Some do sure, but in 99% of environments all virtual machines do not require all the features VMware provides at a significant cost.

If someone chooses to use Citrix XenServer for one half to one fourth the cost of ESX and get most of the features VMware ESX provides, that has nothing to do with how good a IT professional they are. It simplies acknowledges the fact that not all environments have the budgets nor the need for VMware. Same goes for those that consider free or lower cost solutions.

If VMware continues to play to the "IT elitist" attitude they will will find themselves in the same boat as Apple. Great product, but a lot less market share than the competition. It is a lot more ignorant and stupid to buy a product blindly just because it is more expensive and is the safe solution. That mindless nobody ever got fired for buying brand X, so I should be safe and do the same thing might work for some, but don't criticize those that might choose to explore their options.
Anonymous Anonymous Wednesday, December 24, 2008 1:14:00 AM  
"Thanks. But I don't have a fault tolerant datacenter now. Can't afford it. But I might be able to afford one based on Hyper-V."

If you can afford one based on Hyper-V then you can surely afford one based on ESXi which is also free!

I am very happy to say that I was able to build a very resonably priced computer that runs ESXi.

I spent $50 on a motherboard and $100 on a Dual Core AMD CPU. Add 8Gbs of RAM and a < $100 SATA card and a couple of SATA drives and there you go!

ESXi allows me to get a better return on my hardware as I can run linux server operating systems such as Ubuntu JeOS which uses 300Mb of disk space and 30Mb of RAM with a vanilla install.

Hyper-V only supports SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Service Pack 1 or 2 x64 Edition: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/hyperv-supported-guest-os.aspx

I can throw pretty much any OS you care to imagine at ESXi ;p

I can't wait to see what is in ESXi 4 - it sounds like that SATA card may not be required anymore ...
Anonymous Anonymous Thursday, January 01, 2009 8:47:00 PM  
"I can throw pretty much any OS you care to imagine at ESXi ;p"

I care to imagine 64-bit OpenSolaris. Try throwing that at ESXi 3.5u3. :(
Anonymous Anonymous Friday, January 09, 2009 1:53:00 PM  
We did a comparison of both HyperV and Vmware. I was all for Hyper V at first. Was so much cheaper. Yet as soon as you tried to run the microsoft product in a real enviroment you kept encountering walls. Cant, VMotion when we looked at it couldnt have more than one Virtual processor.

The tests we did on VMWare just showed the technology advantages of this product. I have no doubt that Microsoft will improve but for the moment I wouldnt use Hyper V out side of my development network. I also think that VMWare looks after there engineers in terms of acreditation far better than Microsoft. For example you cant do the VMWare exam unless you have been on an official course. This means that you have at least used and played with the product and also helps to make it harder to get. It may seem like an elitist thing to say but makign qualifications more difficult to achieve is a good thing because it helps to maintain your value. When I started in IT in November 1999 the MCSE for example was still a relatively well respected and paid qualification. Now it seems to have little or no value other.

Now my only question is does the Enterprise support I have for ESX 3.5 entitle me to version 4?
Anonymous Anonymous Thursday, January 15, 2009 9:15:00 PM  
"Now my only question is does the Enterprise support I have for ESX 3.5 entitle me to version 4? "

yes, all platinum and gold support includes all major & minor upgrades.

just to chime in a bit, my company uses a full blown VI3 infrastructure with FC SANs, FC boot, blades, DR & SAN replication. some people respectivally dont need that level of performance & HA (high avalability). but there are quite a few people who do. i have not looked into the H-V options, but can say unless it offers the same functionality then why bother looking? call it luxury, convinence, productivity, or what ever you want. bottom line is you need to engineer and design your network to taylor to your needs / wants. people can make the same arrguments about Cisco when it comes to cost etc. they have proven themselves time and time again as the forefront in IP technology. so they stay at the top. does everyone need it? no, but those who do trust it and continue to use it. Microsoft is this anomoly that has time and time again shown to be less then fully functional but still holds a high level of marketshare soley based on usability. so the core question is, do you want it to be cheap and easy or do you want it to just work?
Blogger yargnad Friday, February 13, 2009 5:36:00 AM  
"I care to imagine 64-bit OpenSolaris. Try throwing that at ESXi 3.5u3. :("

I am doing just that. Had to convert it from Workstation 6.5 to ESXi with vCenter Converter and voila! :)
Anonymous Charles Friday, March 13, 2009 1:45:00 PM  
Keep in mind, when talking about cost, that in order to migrate a VM in Hyper-V it will migrate every VM on the same Volume. As well as needing Windows Enterprise. Standard does not support Migration.

These issues are reported as being fixed in R2 which is still a year away. We are currently looking at using Hyper-V for Domain Controllers only. This is the only way that we can justify using it in the interest of saving money and not reducing functionality too greatly. When R2 comes out we will reevaluate. But by then I expect VMWare to have many more features again. VMWare has a tough battle ahead of it and if they keep innovating they have a chance at staying ahead. Microsoft has a long way to go to catch up. They need to drop NTFS in favor of the ability to share a volume between hosts. This seems like a very basic requirement of clustering.
Anonymous Anonymous Monday, March 16, 2009 8:49:00 PM  
"Had a good chuckle during lunch reading these comments. My suggestion... Choose the technologies that best fits your organizations needs and your technical personnal's experiences...."

Yeah, we have ESX cluster (four Dell servers), VMware Server, Microsoft Virtual Server and one two servers Xen Source cluster. All systems have own places in the our IT ecosystem. ESX/Vi is expensive, but it really works, VMware Server is good test enviroment (cheap hardware), MS Virtual Server have fansy NIC config (try change your vmware guest MAC address...). If you likes vmware, MS V, Xen, etc. I don't care, it's only piece of software not life :-)
Anonymous Anonymous Saturday, May 02, 2009 9:53:00 PM  
Have a look at Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V v2... believe me: it will beat VMWare ! Supports many HW, SAN, VLAN's, Nehalem Xeon 55xx, >1 VCPU, LiveMigration (VMotion), ... Even has a System Center Virtual Machine Manager that let you manage VMWare ESX environment and Hyper-V, and of course a tool (powerscript) to migrate vmdk's to VHD's ;-)

If you wonder about licensing... then try the datacenter edition of Server 2008 R2, available for normal people by Q4 2009, you pay the cost per processor on the host (about 1000$/processor/host), unlimited Windows VM's at 0$ / VM Windows license !!!

Byebye VMWare in 2012...
Anonymous Anonymous Friday, May 08, 2009 9:01:00 PM  
Does anyone know if vSphere will have USB support?

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