VMWare demo’d a new version of their VI Toolkit for managing VMs at VMWorld. VI Toolkit 1.0 has been out for awhile, but the new 1.5 version has a few more tricks up its sleeve. According to Carter Shanklin (through CNet) administrators can adjust the configuration of some applications through the toolkit API. For example, “[it] could be used to adjust the configuration of a virtual machine running Microsoft Exchange. In the demonstration, the Exchange server virtual machine was upgraded from 1GB to 4GB of RAM without a reboot.” Note that hot-adding memory is a function of Windows Server 2008.
This opens up a world of possibilities for the virtualized datacenter. One of the headaches in a virtualized environment is that in a lot of ways you still have to manage servers independently. The new version of the VI toolkit has the possibility to adjust many things in an environment from a single console. With the ability to build PowerShell cmdlets administrators could automate many tasks to a single button click.
It’s not hard to see where this is going. I’m excited! I think the next 3-5 years will be very interesting in the virtualization world.
