VMware Infrastructure 3 Hits The Street

VMware has released VMware Infrastructure 3 for general availability. As expected, performance improvements, better automation, and easier management of host and VMs are on the list of improvements. We'll be updating the ESX environments in our virtualization test lab over the holiday season; I'll share any tales of joy or woe as they arise.

A sharp eye reviewing VMware's press release this morning will catch:

Numerous performance optimizations in ESX Server 3.5 such as support for paravirtualized Linux and large memory pages help bring significant performance gains to many common workloads such as Java applications and Oracle databases.

I'm sure this has been in the chute for a long time and has nothing to do with Oracle's recent entry into the VM marketplace.

Other upgrade notes:

If any readers see a trend toward ease of management and increased uptime as priorities, they'd be right. It will be interesting to see how the new bundled functionality compares with third-party utility sets that had addressed management, versioning, and patch maintenance gaps in previous VMware releases.

VMware offers a slew of price points and functionality bundles starting at $995 for a trimmed-down VMware Infrastructure 3 "Foundation" on a two-processor box through $5,750 for VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise two-processor license. Prices go up from there for bigger boxes and additional toys. Check out the release site here.