All Firstserv Cloud customers have been upgraded to VMware 5, which was released in early autumn 2011. VMware have been busy with this new release, and the upgrade provides numerous bug fixes, improvements and enhancements.

"We say goodbye to the old ESX; only ESXi remains. Improvements have been made to the management console and tools; even High Availability has been totally rewritten," explains Matthew Leach, Head of Technical Services at Firstserv. "We are already discovering fewer problems relating to vMotion, set up of new VMs and general management, which means we can spend less time chasing VMware bugs and more time advising our customers."

Firstserv customers will also benefit from the increased reliability. Below is a summary of some of the improvements.

Network I/O Control Enhancements
Improved Network Resource Pools. More ability to reserve I/O resources mean that network performance is improved.

High Availability improvements
Some intermittent issues discovered during testing relating to hardware failover have been resolved. Hardware failover now functions correctly every time.

Improved storage
Disks on servers were previously unused, but can now be introduced to the cluster. This helps to keeps costs down, reduces bottlenecks and increases redundancy.

Improved patching
This simplifies the administration process, meaning it takes up less time.

Larger limits on drive size
This means that more disks can be deployed in a cluster: up to 64TB in a single LUN. More spindles mean faster speeds for users.

Increase in VM size
Up to 1TB of RAM and 32 virtual CPUs are now supported. Database administrators can run even large databases safely. Note however that despite the official line from Microsoft and VMware we still recommend caution, and advise that busy SQL servers remain on physical hardware.

Improvements to vMotion
Improvements mean that even extremely active VMs can be migrated without issue.