Winning a PCW Business Recommended award in our June 2006, the free VMware Server product we reviewed lacked only one major tool – a centralised management console.

This omission is addressed by a recent update to VMware’s Virtual Center application, although this revamped product won’t necessarily be of interest to everyone using the VMware Server platform.

To begin with, unlike the server virtualisation software itself, Virtual Center for VMware Server is a commercial application and far from cheap. We also found it quite complicated to get to grips with and were surprised at the resources needed to run it.

The main server component, for example, requires a Windows host with a fast processor and at least 2GB of Ram, with a multi-processor server and additional memory recommended for larger setups (more than 50 servers).

A database is also needed. This can be a simple Access-based affair for testing and evaluation, but for production use a full SQL Server or Oracle database is recommended.

Installation proved relatively easy, but only after thorough preparation and reading of all the supported documentation – something we strongly recommend to anyone contemplating deploying this application. The Virtual Center server then runs as a background process on the host server, managed by either a local or remote Windows-based Virtual Center Client.

A familiar hierarchical tree interface is the order of the day here, with VMware hosts organised into farms and virtual machines grouped/managed independently. However, you have to configure server farms manually.

A wizard helped us locate and add VMware Servers running on our test Windows Server 2003 and Linux systems. Any existing virtual machines were also discovered and added during the process, after which we were able to create, start and stop VMs from the Virtual Center client, as well as edit their setup and connect to the virtual machines via an integrated remote console.

We could do all of this already from the console that comes with VMware server. Virtual Center adds the ability to manage multiple servers from the one interface. You also get tools to clone virtual machines, and create templates that can be used for rapid deployment of new VMs. Plus, it’s possible to migrate virtual machines from one server to another for load balancing or when a server needs maintenance.

Unfortunately, there’s no live migration, as on VMware’s enterprise-class Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) platform. That means VMs have to be stopped before they can be migrated – not good where production servers are concerned. Neither is it possible to allocate processor or other VM resources, or dynamically balance loads as in VI3. The lack of any tools to take snapshots – provided by the built-in management console – was also something of a disappointment.

On the plus side, Virtual Center does add tools to monitor virtual machines and set alarms when, for example, a VM stops responding or CPU/memory usage exceed pre-set thresholds. However, you will need a critical mass of servers to make these and the other tools worth paying for.

On small deployments of less than 10 servers, it’s unlikely to save much time and money, with the free tools provided with each server just as effective and easy to use. Plus you still need to resort to the individual server consoles in order to take snapshots.