Blade Watch

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/143002/servers_build_in_virtualization.html

Some of the biggest server vendors are starting to ship machines with built-in support for VMware virtualization software. Fujitsu-Siemens began to ship servers with embedded VMware technology Tuesday, while Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM will jump on the bandwagon within 60 days.

All the servers will feature support for VMware’s thinned-down ESX 3i hypervisor, which will simplify configuration and increase security.

“You just start the server, answer a couple of questions, and you’ll be up and running in a couple minutes,” said Robin Prudholm, senior systems engineer at VMware.

The hypervisor has been hardened for improved security, according to Prudholm. The hypervisor software’s size, 32M bytes, also improves security by giving hackers a smaller attack surface.

Very cool, the ability to switch a new ESX server on, have it boot and then allocate the SAN and add it to my existing ESX farms is invaluable. I wonder though, how many customers might still opt for the traditional route? Mainly in terms of system configuration or compliance? Many of the large enterprises have their own ’server build’, their own set of drivers and settings to be ‘production’ standard, switching to a ‘out of the box’ solution might require some testing, regardless the option brings more choice to the customer which has to be a good thing.

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