Long Time Coming

"I know it has been a long time coming, but we hope it has been worth the wait."

And so begins the first post in the VMWare Server 2.0 Beta forum on March 28, 2008 at precisely 3:39 PM. A quick trip to downloads and, there it is. Of course the VIX API 1.5 carries over from Beta 1 but the VMware Infrastructure (VI) Web Access management interface is improved, and finally, support for USB 2.0 devices. Amazingly, still completely free.

Just two days earlier on March 26, 2008 at exactly 11:49 PM, Amazon Web Services announced Elastic IP Addressing and Availability Zones for the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It only takes a moment to confirm that pricing is unchanged at 10 cents an hour for a virtual server in the clouds.

Clearly Amazon and VMWare are technology giants and the value of these advancements is self explanatory. For our small company, WarLock Software, these are especially valuable because they dramatically advance our model for business surviveability at reasonable cost.

The combination of these three (3) technologies will permit a normal organization of any size to automatically (and quickly) replicate their virtual machines along with the files from their physical servers to one, or more, self managed accounts. As important, they will be able to recover on demand to any location in the world, all without programming.

So, we are happy to report that it has definitely been worth the wait, and now with the addition of some PFM (Powerful File Manipulation) from WarLock Software we can all take advantage of these new capabilities.