Review: VMware Infrastructure 3.5

Today virtualization.info relaunches its Review Center starting with the review of the most popular virtualization platform available today: VMware Infrastructure 3.5.

The product was approached as a brand new solution rather than an upgrade of something existing, so this review can be read by the potential customers as well as by the experienced users.

The analysis includes the core capabilities of VirtualCenter and the newest features as detailed in this summary:

  1. Infrastructure specifications
  2. VMware Infrastructure installation and configuration
  3. Virtual machines templates and instances creation
  4. Virtual machines administration
  5. V2V and P2V migrations with VMware Converter
  6. Capacity planning with Guided Consolidation
  7. Hosts and guests patch management with VMware Update Manager
  8. Virtual machines backup with VMware Consolidated Backup
  9. High availability with VMware HA, VMotion and Storage VMotion
  10. Access control and auditing
  11. Power management with VMware Distributed Power Management
  12. Conclusions

For the hardware we used servers, fibre channel SAN and fabric switch provided by IBM and certified in the VMware HCL.

The final result is a 42 pages review (including the screenshots) available here in PDF.