ESX 4.0 - Anyone try this out?

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Gott

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Feb 28, 2008
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Within a month or two, we're going to load ESX 4.0 on a box to see it in action. What caught my eye was the apparent Cisco virtual switch feature so I'm wondering, has anyone played around with ESX 4.0?

I've heard talk about VMWare having virtual firewalls, routers, and [now] switches incorporated into their ESX package. That'd be really exciting to see it come to fruition.
 
It's got some amazing features coming up. Don't have a box to test it on right now, and virtualized it won't run a VM yet, but it's gonna be sweet.
 
SOOOOO, who's in the beta that wants to send me a copy? I asked our sales rep to get into the private beta but it was a no go. I bet he didn't even call them to ask.
 
I don't get it - 3.5 has vswitches. What am I missing here? The only other thing I'd like to see with switching is adding LACP to the physical nics.
 
I did notice a new feature called fault tolerance. It allows you to run a VM on multiple hosts simultaneously in active/passive mode. Right now if a host fails in HA, you have to wait for the VM to boot on another host after the heartbeat timeout. The only other features I saw were configuration improvements which honestly should have already been there. Anyway - I'd love the upgrade as long as we don't have to pay for it!
 
Well, I just made my VCP, and out company just went from VIP partner to Enterprise partner...but I had seen/heard/been provided with nothing on ESX 4.0. How did you get ahold of this? Regarding the ability to run activ,e/passive VMs, that's exactly what they needed to do, IMO. Working for an HPC integrator, HA is a common term around here. In describing VMWare's ESX 3.5 implementation of "HA" to our customers at meetings...well, it's just not very "HA-ish," is it? This is GOOD news.
 
I did have a chance to play with it at VMworld 2008, at which time I was not under any NDA and I can say that it is again going to revolutionize the virtuilization industry, which we thought had already gotten pretty mature. As for the Cisco virtual switch, they run actual IOS code, so basically they have integrated a high performance DynaMips component to the hypervisor. The best thing is that you only configure one switch for the whole cluster, then hosts automatically get the configurations when they are added, so no making sure that network names are exactly the same for vMotion compatibility.

Other than that I am a beta tester but under a strict NDA which I don't intend to violate. If you want to play with the new products, just sign up your site to be a beta tester and everyone wins.
 
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