Under the name of VMware Infrastructure 3.5 (formerly 3.1), ESX Server 3.5 (build 64607), VirtualCenter 2.5 (build 64201), Converter 4.0 (build 62386) and Consolidated Backup 1.1 (build 64559) appear finally available.
What initially was expected to be a minor update, brought a remarkable amount of major improvements for both products, as virtualization.info revealed in August:
- Storage VMotion
- Swapfiles-less VMotion
- Update Manager
- Server consolidation advisor
- Lockdown Mode
- Distributed Power Management (DPM)
- Guest OS disaster recovery capability
- Objects provisioning across datacenters
- Datastore browsing
- Round-Robin Load Balancing
- Integration with VMware Consolidate Backup (VCB) 1.1 and VMware Converter 4.0
- Integration with Wyse multimedia redirection engine
- Support for VMware Server 2.0
- Support for AMD Rapid Virtualization Indexing (formerly Nested Page Tables or NPT)
- Support for Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP)
- Support for InfiniBand network cards
- Support for 10Gbit Ethernet network cards
- Support for TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) network cards
- Support for N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV)
- Support for VCB over iSCSI SANs
- Support for IPv6 in virtual networking
- Support for para-virtualized Linux guest OSes (VMI 3.0 only)
- Support for Intel I/O Acceleration Technology (IOAT)
- Support for Jumbo Frames
- Support for Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF)
- Support for NetFlow analysis on virtual switches
- Support for SATA storage devices
- Support for 200 hosts and 2000 virtual machines
- Support for 128GB RAM per host and for 64GB RAM per virtual machine
VMware Infrastructure 3.5 also introduces new editions and prices, as VMware announced in October:
VI 3.5 is available for download at the following location: ESX Server 3.5 / VirtualCenter 2.5 & Converter 4.0 / Consolidated Backup 1.1.
The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.