Security Analyst – Jeff Soehner CISSP, GXPN,GPYC,GMOB,GCIH

Wow – Novells Platespin 9 now allows you to connect to the new ESXi 5 with a free license and run a complete migration without the need of booting the target manually. In the past we needed to boot an ISO image in order to register a target for migration. The VM API was not available on the free version and the platespin controller wouldn’t create virtual machines unless you had a VMware license but I am happy to report that this has now been changed. We just finished a 64 bit windows 2003 migration onto a patched version of ESXi 5 (474610).

With all of the advancements to VMWare we continue to have more and more things to do. ESXi 3.5 can still be run on older SMP machines and ESXi 4.1 runs very well with the 64bit machines. Both systems can be run to support virtualized windows and linux machines. Recently ESXi 5 came out and will only support multi core processors. I tried to update an older DL380 G4 with the new version but it throws a purple screen of death.
I guess we will all have to get use to running and updating three different versions of vmware until the hardware all gets replaced!