VMware Rolls Out New Modules To Boost Virtualization Services

The new options, slated to become available next year, are part of the Palo Alto, Calif.-based software vendor's strategy to increase the virtualization of services in the data center, VMware CTO and founder Edouard Bugnion said at VMWorld, held this week in San Diego.

The first module, Distributed Resource Schedule, automates the pooling of resources such as blade servers to better scale them out, according to Bugnion. VMware's VMotion application currently allows pooling of resources, but it's a manual process, he said.

With Distributed Resource Schedule, administrators can specify the type and amount of server resources needed, and those resources are made available without the administrator knowing where they are physically located. The goal is to reduce manual intervention in building servers while increasing server utilization by up to 80 percent.

The second module, Distributed Availability Services, provides for automatic failover and rebooting of a virtual server in case of a failure, without the need for clustering, Bugnion said. Such capability provides resiliency against hardware failures so that if a physical server fails, its virtual machine will come back up on another server and reboot automatically, allowing customers to provide service-level agreements and offer four nines of reliability, he said.