VMware Tweaks GSX Server with Version 3

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The VMware unit of disk array maker EMC this week announced enhancements to its operating system virtualization software for 32-bit X86 platforms, GSX Server 3. Soon-to-be rival Microsoft is apparently slipping as it tries to bring Virtual Server 2004 to market, so VMware has a bit of breathing space in a virtualization market it pretty much owns. That said, VMware is going to have to innovate like crazy to keep from being crushed by the onslaught of the Microsoft marketing machine.

A lot of the big innovations for VMware's virtualization products were brought to market last year in anticipation of an initial public offering that never materialized as VMware instead sold itself to EMC for $635 million as 2003 was winding down. As such, GSX Server 3 is not a big leap for the company, but VMware has to keep adding features that make its GSX Server and ESX Server virtualization tools easier to use and better at integrating with other tools for Windows, Linux, NetWare, and other environments so it can have a better story to tell than Microsoft.

To that end, VMware says that GSX Server 3 can now support a maximum of 3.6 GB of main memory per virtual machine, up from 1.2 GB with the prior version of the program. (A reminder: ESX Server is distinct from GSX Server in that ESX Server goes down to bare iron and creates virtual machine partitions that can support Windows or Linux. GSX Server runs inside an existing Windows or Linux instance and it creates virtual machines akin to a DOS Window running on Windows platforms. These GSX Server guest environments can run a full Windows, Linux, or NetWare operating system.) GSX Server 3 also offers 10 to 20 percent better disk and I/O performance, according to the company, and now has the ability to gang up network adapters to create large virtual network links spanning multiple NICs. The latest version also knows how to talk to SCSI tape backup devices, which is important for most commercial servers.

GSX Server 3 has also been integrated with the company's VirtualCenter systems management and provisioning tool, which allows system administrators to quickly provision and re-provision servers with any number of virtual partitions running Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Linux 2.4, and NetWare 4, 5 or 6. GSX Server 3 also now supports automatic startup and shutdown of virtual partitions, which means a partition doesn't have to be shrunk down (yet still be using resources) to allow other partitions to extend themselves dynamically as their policies and workloads demand. Now, if a partition is not doing anything useful, it is removed from the system and uses no resources. The updated GSX Server can also migrate virtual machines to ESX Server, which means companies who start out with GSX Server but who want the better fault isolation and control that comes with ESX Server do not have to start from scratch and rebuild their virtual machines.

One of the tricks with supporting so many guest and host environments is keeping up to date. GSX Server 3 provides support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 hosts. VMware has added support for the following guest environments: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3; SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 7 (patch 2); NetWare 6.5 Server; FreeBSD 4.6.2, 4.8, 5.0 and 5.1 (prerelease version); and Turbolinux Enterprise Server 7.0, 8.0 and Workstation 8.0 with GSX Server 3. The company is also supporting in "experimental mode" the future Microsoft "Longhorn" operating system as a guest and will also support the open source Linux 2.6 kernel as a guest.

GSX Server 3 will be available at the end of February for Windows or Linux host machines. Pricing has not changed from the prior release GSX Server 2.5, and still starts at $2,500 for a two-way X86 server.