VMworld Europe 2009. VMware has used the VMworld Europe 2009 to announce two new products that will be available this year:

1- vCenter Server Heartbeat:

Comes to solve the problem arising from a possible collapse of the server that manages the VMware virtualized platforum, specifically vCenter Server earlier known by Virtual Center. The vCenter Server Heartbeat comes to provide High availability for the vCenter. Prior to vCenter Server Heartbeat you were only able to have one vCenter to manage your infrastructure if that vCenter fail VMware’s Live migration with VMotion, load balancing with Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), license management, and performance monitoring all cease to function.

Architecturally, Server Heartbeat is implemented as an active/passive vCenter servers, running on physical or virtual machines. In addition to server and network hardware, Server Heartbeat monitors the actual vCenter instance, its back-end database, and the underlying operating system. In the case of failure, the passive node takes over, and Heartbeat restarts the vCenter service. Failover can occur over both LANs and WANs.

I can sense some people already arguing that you could achieved the same result of vCenter heartbeat Server by running vCenter inside a virtual machine & VMware HA. If you had implemented that then you will notice three big limitations with that:

a- As HA is only supported in a single site then that redundancy for vCenter was only valid for a single site & you were not able to use it for DR. The great news this limitation can be over come with vCenter Server Heartbeat.

b- A corruption in the vCenter virtual machine was not recoverable with the earlier setup. This as well can be avoided with vCenter Server Heartbeat

c- That only supported vCenter running inside a virtual machine, where in larger environments its highly preferred to install it in a physical machine, where vCenter Server Heartbeat work for both virtual machines & physical machine.

If you had been working as a VMware consultant for a VMware partner for a while, then you know how good of a news vCenter Server Heartbeat is. No more the customers have to worry about the failure of VMware vCenter. More updates on this will come in future posts.

2-  vShield Zones

vShield Zones allows the virtual separation of different applications running in a virtualized environment. vShield Zones eliminates the needs for a physical separation/partitioning between virtual machines running different applications with different security requirements. This technology comes in response to demand from those companies that had security issues which forced them to install their applications on different physical servers to prevent potential security problems. More on this will be revealed in future posts so keep coming back.

Furthermore, vSphere has been mentioned for the first time officially by VMware at VMworld Europe 2009. Right after that a lot of attendees has a doubt that vSphere will be the official name of the new version of VMware Infrastracture namely VMware VI4. Though VMware representative has declined that and explained vSphere will not be a single product but the name of a range of solutions that enable flexibility and other features in the virtualized data center, ie in cloud computing technology which VMware call vCloud.

I hope this post was informative & more to come from VirtualizationMaster & I with our visit here at VMworld. It seems VMworld Europe 2009 is filled with suprises.