Dell's 'Veso' appliance runs on four-core Opterons and thin VMware

Two minutes to ESX Server

By Ashlee Vance in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 11th September 2007 17:23 GMT

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VMworld The mysterious Dell virtualization server appliance – code-named Veso – will ship at the end of November, leading the charge for systems with embedded hypervisors.

VMware CEO Diane Greene and Dell CMO Mark Jarvis revealed technical details about Veso during a speech today at the VMworld conference. The Veso box will ship as a two-socket unit based on AMD's new four-core Opteron chip. It will also have twice as much memory as Dell's typical two-socket systems and have four I/O channels as opposed to two on normal units.

Dell thinks the system could consume about 25 per cent less power than typical servers, since Veso has thrown out hard disks in favor of embedding VMware's new 32MB ESX 3i hypervisor in flash memory.

Greene confirmed that Dell will "be the first one to ship" a system with the new hypervisor. The likes of HP and IBM should follow shortly.

IBM, for example, has committed to shipping its first system using the new X4 chipset - x3950 M2 - with a virtualization appliance option. In addition, Fujistu Siemens Computers will ship systems with ESX 3i through the channel only, starting in the first quarter of 2008.

Server makers should also start bringing out kit with an embedded version of XenSource's hypervisor in short order.

To get the light version of ESX, VMware did little more than strip out the close-to-2GB service console that's part of the core ESX Server product.

You can expect most of the major server makers to embrace this new, lightweight hypervisor and make virtualization a basic component of their systems. ®

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