VMware Extends ESX Server to 64 Bits, Betas New P2V Converter

Published: October 5, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The VMware subsidiary of EMC this week announced that it has finally delivered a 64-bit version of its top-end ESX Server hypervisor, which is the centerpiece of its enterprise business. VMware also introduced German and Japanese language support for the product, and rolled out a beta version of a new physical-to-virtual conversion tool, called VMware Converter 3.

When the Infrastructure 3 suite of hypervisor tools was announced in June, the ESX Server 3.0 hypervisor at the center of these products was only enabled to support 32-bit operating systems, even if they were running on the hypervisor which in turn was running on 64-bit X64 iron. VMware's announcements in June gave the impression that this 64-bit support was already there for operating systems such as Windows and Linux, and VMware even promised that support for 64-bit Solaris 10 would be ready in a few months. As it turns out, the 64-bit support was "experimental," and with the ESX Server 3.0.1 update, true 64-bit support is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and 10, and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP.

GSX Server, which was rebranded as VMware Server, has supported 64-bit guest operating systems for some time, and VMware Player could similarly support 64-bit virtual machines. While ESX Server is a bare-metal hypervisor that puts operating systems side-by-side on a piece of iron, GSX Server is a hypervisor that runs on top of a Windows or Linux operating system like any other application, which in turn allows operating system instances on virtual machines to run atop this hypervisor.

According to Karthik Rau, senior director of infrastructure products and solutions at VMware, ESX Server 3.0 and its related management tool, VirtualCenter 2.0, were rewritten from scratch to include internationalization features. These features make it possible for VMware to create different language versions of the program, and German and Japanese are the first non-English languages that will be available with ESX Server 3.0.1 and VirtualCenter 2.0.1. It seems likely that Chinese, Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, and Hindu are the next languages that will be given support next in these products, but Rau did not divulge the company's plans.

In addition to the tweaks to support 64-bit operating systems and new languages, VMware is also for the first time allowing virtual machines to be automatically upgraded from 32-bit ESX 2.X versions to 64-bit ESX 3.X versions. The way it works, according to Rau, is that customers have to buy the VMotion virtual machine teleportation software, and they use this to move a VM from the machine running the earlier ESX Server hypervisor to a machine running the new one. As the older VM runs on that machine, it stays in 32-bit ESX Server 2.X mode, but once it is restarted on the new hypervisor, all of the guts of the VM are upgraded to 64-bit support as well as having access to new capabilities, such as access to larger virtual SMP configurations, bigger main memories, and support for iSCSI storage links and the Virtual Machine File System that VMware added to the newest product.

VMware also showed off the beta version of a kicker to its P2V Assistant, a tool that is used to convert physical server instances to virtual ones. According to Rau, VMware Converter 3 will merge the P2V Assistant, which is four years old, with the VM Importer tool, which is only one year old, to allow more sophisticated conversion and snapshotting of virtual machines. VM Importer can convert other virtual machine formats to ESX Server formats.

Rau says that VMware Converter 3 will be available in two versions. One is a free version that can do a single migration of a physical server to a virtual one, and the other will be merged into the VirtualCenter Management Server, which is an add-on for the Infrastructure 3 suite that costs $5,000. The latter product will be able to manage multiple, concurrent migrations. VMware Converter 3 is expected to be available in the next six months.

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