Official download was available on May 21st, 2009, and I was waiting anxiously for my license keys for the new vCenter (management console) and host license keys (that which is the hypervisor)…
I got them on that day, and then proceeded to spend way too much time with it. For some people, addiction is a bad thing. For me…no need to guess.
I find playing and working with VMware (and the suite of tools available) to be on par with playing World of Warcraft. I can lose myself for hours and hours. With WoW, I complete quests, work with groups of people (9 or 24 others) accomplishing a goal. With VMware, I make clusters, I play virtual networking games, I make one computer act like many.
Since Thursday, I have upgraded my not-for-resale copies of vCenter and installed an Enterprise level host (well, upgraded from ESX 3.5 to vSphere 4 Enterprise). I want to get used to things. It hasn’t taken very long to get comfortable. Sure, some things have changed, but the core methods have not.
Hopefully over the next 2-4 weeks I can upgrade our VMware cluster(s) to vSphere 4 from ESX 3.5. The added performance benefits (according to VMware), the prettier and better organized client software (still no native Mac client, BOO!), and the eventual vNetwork Distributed Switch implementation.
My testing so far (ha, hard to believe what you can do in 4 days), upgrading the infrastructure shouldn’t be hard at all, and should be pretty seamless in our data center, though before the clusters get some love, I’ll be doing a few more test installs and test upgrades.
Until next time… VMware addict out!