DC07 What’s new in vCenter Server

VMware is moving away from managing the hardware to managing applications. The next release of vCenter (release data not mentioned, will be somewhere in 2009) will have a new GUI. GUI will be dashboard style with icons. vMotion will now be executed using the GUI instead of command line like it is now. (or freeware tools).

The most published new option of vCenter is the linked mode. By using linked mode the VI client can connect to more than one vCenter Server. This can be usefull for situations in which one vCenter Server is not sufficient. (because organization has more ESX hosts than vCenter can manage, or because of geographical reasons, or DR reasons (Site Recovery Manager needs two vCenter Servers)

vCenter will have more alarms and more monitoring of events. New actions are for example putting a ESX host in maintenance mode when the temperature of the servers becomes too high.

Reports on the usage of storage are added. Performance monitoring will be much better for instance by being able to monitor CPU and internal memory in the same window.

vCenter Server can manage more ESX hosts (300 now) and more virtual machines (3000). Also a DRS/HA cluster can have 64 nodes.