Probably the biggest surprise of VMWorld 2008 is that they did not announce ESX 4, although the guy running my PowerShell scripting seminar said that certain features in the beta of the VI Toolkit (their platform for using PowerShell) take advantage of ESX 4, like the ability to hot-add RAM to a VM.

One of the most significant products announced here VDC-OS, is summed up in this article.  http://virtualizationreview.com/news/article.aspx?editorialsid=10197 , also discussed on VMware’s site here: http://vmware.com/technology/virtual-datacenter-os/ .  In a nutshell, it allows management of ALL VirtualCenter Servers from one screen, it introduces a new version of the VIC an allows for things like searching for all VMs that have been running for a month.  In the results pane of the search, you can make changes to all in that group.  In other words, if the search returned 4 VMs, you could then install/upgrade the VMware Tools on all 4 VMs right there.

Another that they talked about is renaming VirtualCenter Server to vCenter.  The product will have a linked mode, so that when you use VDC-OS, and you make a change to say, a role named Night Manager on one VC, it will go into the centralized backend and then automatically populate to all VCs!  I asked if it was granular, it is not.  It’s an all or nothing feature, you can’t say, send to all VCs, except VC28.

With this technology, licenses will also be centralized and will have the ability to have security put on them.

Another product they mentioned was vCenter Administrator Portal (VCAP), which is a web-based Appliance that connects to and works across  multiple VC’s.  It allows for some functions across VCs, hosts and VMs, like the VDC-OS, but there is no linked mode because it will work with VC 2.0 and 2.5.  It should be out in 30 days.  It provides a search based interface.  As a demo, he asked it to display all powered on VMs.  It allows you to launch a VIC to manage hosts as well.

Also, they said, “Customers need tools to maintain and configure ESX hosts consistently across the datacenter.”  Their answer is called Host Profiles. These profiles are the following:

o   Host Profile = Collection of root sets (Like a Role = collection of Privileges)

o   You make the configuration you want for ESX Hosts on a single “golden” ESX host (used to create a host profile - export)

o   Attach it to host or cluster & apply profile to host or cluster

o   Any new ESX hosts added, get profile automatically.

o   Can check hosts for compliance

o   Can bring hosts into compliance

Finally, they announced that ALL events in VC will be “alarm-able”.  I think that feature is a subtle but significant step forward for better monitoring and security.

More to come later.  By the end of September, all the sessions, slides, and lab files will be available on the VMWorld site for attendees to download.  I will do a more comprehensive review on those once I get them.  JSW