I’m happy to say that I have been accepted into the VMware Virtual Infrastructure 4 beta program (shout out to my friend John Troyer over at VMware for helping with this). Unfortunately due to the Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) I am bound by, I will not be able to discuss VI4 details at all with the public or with other VI4 beta participants outside of the VMware VMTN Community VI4 beta forums.
I’m quite certain a lot of great features await my discovery, some of which I saw at VMworld 2008. One of the difficulties of beta testing is seeing the new features, but not being able to put them to practical use in production datacenters until the (suspected) 2009 release. It’s like being a kid, Christmas shopping in June with your parents and they throw something in the cart for you that you really like, but you can’t have it until Christmas day.
I’ve had some pet peeves posted in VMware’s Product and Feature Suggestions forums for a long time and hopefully these will be addressed in VI4 or sooner (most of these IMO should require little effort to resolve, but then again I’m not a developer):
- Feedback from VirtualCenter why maintenance mode DRS is stalling
- Why are DNS and default gateway fields required in TCP/IP configuration for guest customization?
- DRS anti-affinity rules bugged when 3 or more VMs are added to the rule
- VM uptime is reset when VMotioned
- Alignment and standardization of VI component versioning
- ESX 4.x, VirtualCenter 4.x
- Published build numbers on the download page match build numbers within the software
- Two different family revs of Converter is somewhat confusing (3.x for the downloadable version, 4.x for the VirtualCenter integrated version)
“One of the difficulties of beta testing is seeing the new features, but not being able to put them to practical use in production datacenters until the (suspected) 2009 release.”
Come on. That doesn’t stop all of those MS people from running Hyper-V in production according to the highly accurate (yeah, right) IDC report. 🙂