There are some new features on the horizon for the VMware Virtual Infrastructure in the latest releases of ESX 3.1 and VirtualCenter 2.1. Although we haven’t officially seen anything on these releases the buzz is that we can expect to see some if not all of the following.
VMware now officially supports running the VirtualCenter database on SQL Server 2005. As you may have expected there are a few caveats and a handful of configuration items you need to take into consideration. However, for the most part this is great news and will allow you to *finally* get rid of those SQL Server 2000 servers.
Running VirtualCenter in a virtual machine is fully supported by VMware to the same degree as if it were installed on a physical server. There are several reasons why deploying VirtualCenter in a virtual machine would be advantageous: