Download VMware VirtualCenter 2.5

In recent years, virtualization has been increasingly used in business. Well-known names include Xen and VMware. The latter has conquered a solid position in the market with its VMware Infrastructure 3 setup. An important part of VMware Infrastructure 3 is VMware VirtualCenter. This allows you to manage the virtual environment and monitor performance. For more information, please refer to Julie this one and this one pages. The developers have released version 2.5 of VMware VirtualCenter with the following changes:

VirtualCenter 2.5 Changes:

• Manage active sessions—VirtualCenter 2.5 allows administrators to view all users logged in to a VirtualCenter Server, terminate any active sessions when necessary, and send a message to those logged in.
• Manage remote console connections—You can now configure VirtualCenter 2.5 to set the maximum number of allowed console connections (0 to 100) to all virtual machines.
• Manage database connections—You can control the maximum number of database connections to be created between VirtualCenter 2.5 and the database server in use.
• Lockdown mode—VirtualCenter 2.5 provides administrators with the option to disable direct remote access to ESX Server 3 hosts as a root user after VirtualCenter 2.5 has taken control of a given host. This is called “lockdown mode.” Enabling this mode ensures that the host is managed only through VirtualCenter 2.5. Certain limited management tasks can still be performed while in lockdown mode by logging in to the local console on the host as a non-root user.
• Virtual machine swapfile location—VirtualCenter 2.5 provides support for configuring a default location for virtual machine swap files for all virtual machines on a given host or cluster. The administrator can choose to store the swap file in the same directory as the virtual machine configuration file or select a datastore specified by the host for storing the swapfile. If it is not possible to store the swap file in the datastore specified by the host, the swap file is stored in the same folder as the virtual machine.
• Licensing—VirtualCenter 2.5 provides an unlicensed evaluation mode that doesn’t require that you install and configure a license server while installing VirtualCenter 2.5 and ESX Server 3. Also, the license server installed with VirtualCenter 2.5 supports multiple license files in a directory.
• Expiration user account—VirtualCenter Server creates a user account (the VIM account) on ESX Server hosts that are under its management. VirtualCenter Server assigns a random password to this account and stores this password in its database. In VirtualCenter 2.5, the password automatically changes 30 days after it was last changed. The default expiration age can be changed using the option manager by assigning a different value to the key VirtualCenter.VimPasswordExpirationInDays.
• VirtualCenter 2.5 plug-ins—VMware independently releases optional applications that you can install on top of VirtualCenter 2.5 to provide additional capabilities. For example, you can use the VMware Converter plug-in to convert physical machines into ESX Server 3 virtual machines.
• Automating service behavior based on firewall settings—VirtualCenter 2.5 can automate services start up based on the status of firewall ports. Such automation helps ensure that services start if the environment is configured in a way that enables their function.