It’s been nearly 11 months since I wrote the feature request post where I asked for some features currently missing in VMware. Now, it’s time to see how it went:

• Live Cloning or backup: Live cloning to either a template or a new VM was added in ESXi 3.5 U2.
• Storage VMotion GUI integration: New feature in vCenter 4.0/vCenter Client 4.0.
• Linux support for VMware Infrastructure: There is currently a technology preview program running. More info at VMware’s beta community.
• IPMI integration: Support added in vCenter 4.0/vCenter Client 4.0.

So, currently, we only lack Linux support for VMware Infrastructure. Hopefully, VMware is busy making it.

Now, it’s time for some new features I want:

1) Host profiles: Host profiles is a new feature with vSphere. Now, I have had some experience with Virtual Iron which utilizes host profiles in a manner that I like. The biggest problem with VMware’s approach is that is does not make the whole deployment process automatic. Virtual Iron deployment is quite simple: Just install a single master host with the management software and tell the other nodes to boot from PXE. When the nodes are PXE booted, they get their IP address from an internal DHCP server at the master host and shows up in the administration GUI. When they are added to a cluster, they inherit host settings from the cluster. For example, a new host is automatically configured with network and storage settings.

Why does not VMware take the same approach? Why do we need to do some magic tricks to configure a management network, root password and such? Why can’t we just say that we want to use iSCSI from some host? Currently, as far as I know, only some of these settings are added automatically when a host profile is installed on an ESXi host.

2) Customizable GUI: It would be nice if it was possible to modify the GUI. This especially applies to the summary tab where a lot of scrollbars appears since the boxes are locked. Why can’t we resize them? The GUI should be modifyable and less dependent on web pages.

3) Console proxy: The vCenter should act as a console proxy for hosts that have mangement interfaces on internal networks. By acting as a proxy, it will be possible to use the vCenter client to connect to the vCenter server from anywhere in the world and pull opp the console from virtual machines directly in the client. Currently, the only way of achieving this (as far as I know) is to use terminal services and open the vCenter client on a virtual machine connected to the same network as the hosts.

There are to concerns with this approach. The first one is security – you don’t want to operate the management interfaces on public networks if you don’t have to.  The second is performance related: by using terminal services, the console image has to be transferred twice; first from the actual host to the terminal server and then from the terminal server to the client. Two separate methods of console access used for displaying a single image. It would be easier if the vCenter just proxyed connections from a client to a host.