VMware adds more features to its GO management portal for SMBs

In January 2010 VMware released a free web management console called Go.
The product, supporting ESXi hosts only, is a hosted platform that the vendor offers to SMB customers.

Go allows to initialize and patch ESXi hosts, create and operate virtual machines, check the VMs patching level connecting to the Shavlik Technologies service, but customers have to grant to VMware the privilege to analyze the way they interact with the console.

VMware never release any public information about the level of adoption of this tool, and this the first time it gets an update.

The new version is able to perform a Virtual to Virtual (V2V) migration from VMware Server to ESXi, an interesting move considering the hints that the former platform will be discontinued by June 2011.

On top of that, VMware introduced a new Collective Intelligence engine, which offers guidance on server consolidation by elaborating and presenting data collected from all other customers.
This engine would provide information like the average number of virtual machines users are creating per ESXi server, the top five hardware types on which the community is running ESXi, or the top five virtual appliances that have been downloaded from VMware Go.