VMWare Server 2.0 Beta

Funny enough, I got an email from VMWare inviting us to participate in the VMWare Server 2.0 Beta. This was great news to me that they are continuing to do development on the free VMWare Server product. I really expected them to push more of us to VM Infrastructure lines. Looks like there is an early 2008 release goal to production of 2.0.

Kudos to VMWare for this as it is a great way to help folks like my organization to get started with virtualization at low cost (free) for the Software and as we grow we can grow in to the additional features of VM Infrastructure.

Straight from the site, some of the new features include:

• Web-based management interface: A new Web-based user interface provides a simple, flexible, intuitive and productive way for you to manage your virtual machines.
• Expanded operating system support: VMware Server now supports Windows Vista Business Edition and Ultimate Edition (guest only), Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn Server Beta 3), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ubuntu 7.1, among others.
• Greater scalability: Take full advantage of high-end hardware with support for up to 8GB of RAM per virtual machine, up to two virtual SMP (vSMP) processors and up to 64 virtual machines per host.
• 64-bit guest operating system support: Run high-performance operating systems in virtual machines with support for Intel EM64T VT-enabled processors and AMD64 processors with segmentation support.
• Support for VIX API 1.2: This feature provides a programming interface for automating virtual machine and guest operations.
• Support for Virtual Machine Interface (VMI): This feature enables transparent paravirtualization, in which a single binary version of the operating system can run either on native hardware or in paravirtualized mode.
• Support for USB 2.0 devices: Transfer data at faster data rates from USB 2.0 devices.

Exciting stuff....