One Small Step for VMware, One Giant Leap for Utility Computing

VMware this week unveiled a technology it is billing as a huge advancement for utility computing and the product in which it will play a starring role.

VMware this week unveiled a technology it is billing as a huge advancement for utility computing and the product in which it will play a starring role.

VMware Control Center powered by VMotion technology is designed to enable enterprises to respond to changing business demands in real time while maximizing server resource utilization.

While VMware is excited about Control Center and hopes to profit from it, it is the technology powering the new offering that the vendor is most excited about.

VMotion technology enables live, stateful applications to be moved across
distributed systems without service interruption, lost data, or lost
transactions, thus making it possible for enterprises to manage distributed, heterogeneous computing environments as a single pool of hardware resources.

Control Center is designed specifically for ESX Server and GSX Server, software that carves up multi-processor servers into smaller one or two CPU servers or ‘virtual machines,’ enabling multiple operating systems, including Microsoft Windows and Linux, to run simultaneously and independently on the same Intel-based server.

Control Center enables enterprises to centrally manage and control all of their virtual machines and maximize use of their physical servers, including blade servers. The new product will also enable administrators to quickly respond to changing business demands and move virtual machines from one physical server to another with continuous service availability.

Other key components of VMware Control Center include:

• Centralized Management Console: Users manage their entire computing
  infrastructure (i.e., virtual machines, virtual machine group and virtual disk
  images) from a central interface
• Virtual Machine Dashboard: Users can monitor virtual machine performance
  and availability across all hosts in the environment, modify resource
  allocations, and migrate virtual machines across hosts based on utilization
  profiles
• Server Provisioning: Users simplify server provisioning by managing
  a repository of hardware-independent virtual machine templates and using a
  wizard-based system to quickly deploy new servers
• Secure Access Management: Users can employ a delegated administrator
  model to secure access to key pieces of VMware Control Center and restrict
  management rights on a per-virtual machine or per-host basis and can
  seamlessly leverage existing user management systems

VMware Control Center, now in private beta, is scheduled to be released to the general public later this year.