This June Microsoft launched a new initiative called Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) to simplify customers’ life when they need support for company’s software running on virtual machines.
The program already generated a lot of buzz for two good reasons:
- some vendors which didn’t have a hypervisor to validate surprisingly appear as members (good example are Cisco and Unisys).
- the most combative competitor VMware was the first to achieve validation for its hypervisor ESX
After this LeMagIT took the disturb to dig more into this last achievement and discovered something interesting.
The SVVP program is developed in a way that every applicant has to submit for validation a specific configuration and the Microsoft support will apply to that configuration only.
At the moment VMware gained validation for ESX 3.5 Update 2 only when running on AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon CPUs with no more than 4 virtual processors and no more than 4GB RAM per 32-bit virtual machine.
This situation should improve over time as VMware clarified its commitment to achieve new SVVP validations within 60 days of new hypervisor releases (like the upcoming ESX 3.5 Update 3).
Update: Microsoft just published additional VMware configurations that are validated.
Now VMware customers can run with confidence also virtual machines with 64bit Windows Server 2008 and up to 16GB of virtual memory.
VMware informed virtualization.info that more configurations are being published as SVVP valid in the coming weeks.