Tuesday, August 26, 2008

VMware Server 2.0 is coming ...

Last week, VMware released another candidate of oncoming Server 2.0 denoted as RC 2. Because I'm using the current stable version 1.0.6 in my testing environment a lot, I'm looking forward to the new one as well. It should bring a lot of new useful features among which belongs:
  1. support of USB 2.0 devices - it will be more comfortable to use high-speed USB memory sticks
  2. online disk capacity expansion - it will be possible to hot-add a SCSI hard drive to virtual machine and to expand its size on the fly without powering it off
  3. VMCI - Virtual Machine Communication Interface will allow efficient communication between virtual machines or between virtual machine and host system so you don't need to use more generic and slower communication channels like network
  4. virtual machine scalability - virtual machine will be able to manage up to 8GB of memory (the current stable release can manage 3.6GB only) and it will suport two-way vSMP (current release contains experimental support only)
  5. remote client devices - new VMware Remote Console will allow to use not hosted devices such as CD-ROM
  6. broader OS support - support of Microsoft Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 or RHEL 5 will be included
And that's not everything. More details are written at www.vmware.com. For impatient, VMware provides beta program which allows you to try it. As well, read the released user guide.

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