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12/22/2008 This the final note to let you know that this blog (Gerben's Blog On Virtualization) has moved to virtualarchitect.nl. Please alter your links to contain the new url. The feed address has also changed: http://feedproxy.google.com/gerbensblogonvirtualization
Existing feedburner subscribers will automatically be redirected to the feedproxy from google.
Unfortunately subscribers to the live.com-feed have to change the feed subscription manually. The new blog is a self hosted Wordpress blog, which gives me more flexibility for appearance and functionality. All the content of the live-space has been moved to the new url.
Happy reading in 2009! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Gerben 
12/17/2008 Lefthand Networks - John Spiers John Spiers co-founder of Lefthand Networks (LHN) elaborated about Virtual SAN's in the Virtual Data Center. He started to mention the acquisition of Lefthand Networks by HP and showing a HP branded presentation. LHN was founded in 1999 and it was then they started selling ISCSI-based storage, even before the protocol was formally standardized, according to John Spiers. LHN addresses problems like the fact that servers nowadays are mapped to static resources and the demand of virtual performance for ports, zones and RAID groups is rising, etc. How does LHN address these problems.
LHN has five (5) main features: - Storage Clustering
- Network Raid
- Thin Provisioning
- Snapshots
- Remote Copy (Disaster Recovery)
I was sitting next to a former colleague/customer, and while listening I remembered we recently discussed the concept of High Available an physically separated Sites (+50 km) and the ability to vMotion a VM from one site to another. Almost every requirement was met to make it work except for the storage. And I mean really high available and not a DR solution. When the first DC fails the other DC has to take over using HA or the new Fault Tolerance feature. The discussion focused on the storage side and questions like how to make the storage high available in a way that the storage is available instantly in the other datacenter without having to act on it. First another colleague mentioned Storage vMotion. We concluded that using Storage vMotion creates a low available solution (takes time to copy data with SvMotion) and you will end up failovering by hand if you're lucky to be able to do that in case of failures. So for this scenario it's a no go. Site Recovery Manager (with underlying storage replication) is not a solution either, using SRM you still have to get the LUN out of replication mode to use it (make it active). Besides this, SRM is not an High Available solution it is a Disaster Recovery Solution and it takes downtime as granted. Someone has to push the button to failover with SRM, so another manual factor. During this session another option popped up. Lefthand Networks offers a so called Network Raid, with the Network Raid it is possible to use a single SAN across (physically separated) sites. RAID 0 mirroring might be a worth a shot. Downside of this can be the network latency, this must be less than 5 ms. Also hardware dependency may be something to keep in mind VirtualGeek wrote an interesting article about Storage vMotion partly related to the discussion mention above: http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/12/real-world-experiences-using-storage-vmotion.html#more Then the session and the discussion ended... Comments are welcome.
* This BLOG will soon move to: http://blog.virtualarchitect.nl/ (already online) please alter your links *
* Thank you! *
A couple of months ago Veeam acquired nworks. Nworks is known for its agentless connectors for managing an VMware ESX (also ESXi !!) environment in SCOM and HP Operations Manager (Openview). Veeam just released version 4.0 of the management connectors. Nworks is one of the few connectors which integrates with SCOM & HPSOM. Especially in larger organizations where SCOM or HPSOM is the main monitoring tool, integration with the mentioned monitoring tools is more or less mandatory when introducing a new system (in this case VMware). Using plugin's like nWorks in one way makes life easy for administrators, they don't have to write their own management packs and or scripts (in case of MOM), in the other way you have a challenge filtering the right events, because it generates a lot of events. But as they say better too much than too little. Of course there are more monitoring tools like Veeam's own Monitor product and of course Vizioncore's vFoglight (formerly vCharter Pro), but with one monitoring solution in place introducing a second tool for monitoring is a political challenge in most cases, unless there is a very good integration with the company 'standard' tool. The new release 4.0 is a major release, which means that you will have to upgrade all components (for existing users :)). What's new in this release: - Hardware monitoring is now available through VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure SDK
- Changes to performance metrics (changed and new ones)
- Improved VirtualCenter 2.5 API support
- VMware tools version events
- VMware datastores are now displayed in a separate branch of the topology
- The collection interval for the collector is now adjustable (can be increased)
- suppression of events in case of unknown previous state, which is great in larger environments so your monitoring tool will not be 'spammed' with events
- A single collector install file is now used for both the Microsoft MP and HP SPI
- The list of ESX hosts managed by the VirtualCenter is updated every collection cycle. In previous versions, the list of hosts in the Configuration UI was only updated when a user clicked “Validate”; now, the list of hosts under a VC server connection is updated as soon as the collector detects a change. The change is actually in the collector service, but the effect is visible in the Configuration UI.
- and more...
Microsoft SC Operations Manager:
http://veeam.com/vmware-esx-monitoring-ms-operations.html
HP Software Operations Manager:
http://veeam.com/vmware-esx-monitoring-hp-operations.html * This BLOG will soon move to: http://blog.virtualarchitect.nl/ (already online) please alter your links * * Thank you! *
VKernel just released Capacity Analyzer 3.0. In addition to showing bottlenecks in hosts, clusters, and resource pools, it now shows bottlenecks in VMs -- both inside and outside of VMs. Even small environments have hundreds of VMs, causing ongoing monitoring and finding problems in each individual VM to be very time consuming. Capacity Analyzer 3.0 sorts through them to show the most problematic VMs first, so you can quickly see which VMs are having current performance problems. With predictive analytics, we also identify which VMs will have performance problems and when, so that you can take necessary proactive measures. Download and try Capacity Analyzer 3.0 here in your environment. We have also made over 20 improvements and fixes in Capacity Analyzer 3.0. For example, the new UI is now tabbed-based making it easier and faster to find the information you need. The 14-day free trial of the fully functional, production ready Capacity Analyzer 3.0 is now ready for download * This BLOG will soon move to: http://blog.virtualarchitect.nl/ (already online) please alter your links * * Thank you! *12/15/2008 
Opening
Victor van den Berg opened the 2008 Dutch VMUG meeting by welcoming the crowd. With over 600 attendees a sold out event again. Victor showed some statistics about the VMUG activities and web site usage over the past year. Keynote Richard Garsthagen continued with the keynote, in which he gave an overview of the solutions offered by VMware today and in the near future.
Some topics which were already covered by VMworld 2008 were mentioned.
Topics like vCloud, Appspeed and Fault tolerance are some new features where I personally am very excited about. I saw Richard at previous conferences, but this was the first time I attended one in Dutch language by Richard :) A couple of highlights:
Appspeed: This VMware function is the result of the recent acquisition of BHive by VMware. AppSpeed monitors the performance of specific applications that run inside a VM and automates the actions necessary to resolve certain detected performance issues. For example adding extra web servers in case of heavy load. Fault tolerance: Creates a mirror VM on an other host, which undisrupted can be activated when an host becomes unavailable. With the vCloud initiative vendors have agreed to use a unified communication protocol. In this way every system reports in the same way wether it's on-premise or off-premise. Comments: This makes it much easier for companies to hire extra capacity externally, or even have extra capacity standby in case of emergency. Commercial web sites for example have to deal with extra orders and visitors a couple of weeks before Christmas, in this period it may be convenient and cost effective to have some extra web and transaction servers standby. Using this kind of 'on-demand' extra capacity and give the capacity back when not needed can save lot's of money. From a IT-audit point of perspective this vCloud 'thing' can bring some extra complexity regarding external connections. I won't be surprised when some sort of certification is introduced regarding this vCloud to certify that the (cloud-service) supplier meets certain criteria, and that as a (cloud-service) customer you can be sure that it's secure.
Main focus of VMware:
1. Virtual Datacenter OS (VDOS) - Flexibility and efficiency
2. Federation Cloud - Scalability
3. Desktop Richard also mentioned there is a slight possibility of having VMsafe Hands On Labs at VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes, France. Video recording Eric Sloof at NTPRO.nl has uploaded a video impression of the event at his site: Video Impression of Dutch VMUG Meeting 2008 And guess what, I'm on it too: 1'59: 
* Thank you! *12/4/2008 At VMworld 2008 in the US VMware annouced the new names for the different products in her portfolio. I can imagine that these new names can be confusing, so I'm glad that after reading Arne Fokkema's post who quoted blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/12/do-they-smell-a.html that I'm not the only one for who it's dazzling sometimes. However some of the products are new, most of the presented names are like the old dutch saying "Oude wijn in nieuwe zakken" (translated: old wine in new bags). From now on current releases of the application and management products along with the VDI products will be presented in their new "Couture" on VMware's website.  
An overview: VMware vCenter
Brand name for all infrastructure and application management products from VMware VMware VirtualCenter → VMware vCenter Server
The central management product for VMware Infrastructure
VMware Lifecycle Manager → VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
Workflow automation product for creation, deployment and decommissioning of virtual machines
VMware Converter → VMware vCenter Converter (for the version integrated into vCenter)
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone (for the separately downloadable version); comes in two flavors: Enterprise and Starter
Physical to virtual (P2V) conversion product
VMware Lab Manager → VMware vCenter Lab Manager
Automation product for application development environments
VMware Stage Manager → VMware vCenter Stage Manager
Automation product for application staging and deployment environments VMware Update Manager → VMware vCenter Update Manager
Host and virtual machine patch management product integrated with vCenter Server
VMware Site Recovery Manager → VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Disaster recovery orchestration product
VirtualCenter Foundation → vCenter Server Foundation
Node limited version of vCenter Server
VMFS → VMware vStorage VMFS
VMware’s cluster file system VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure → VMware View
VMware’s integrated desktop virtualization solution that delivers enterprise-class control and manageability
Virtual Desktop Manager (VDM) → VMware View Manager
Enterprise class server which manages connections from end points to virtual desktops or hosted desktops while helping rapidly provision desktops VMware Administrator Interface → VMware View Administrator
Administrator Interface for View Manager
VDM Agent → VMware View Manager Agent
Agent for View Manager to talk to the virtual desktop VDM Web Access → VMware View Portal
Access to virtual desktops through web browser
VDM Client for Windows → VMware View Client for Windows
Client used to install on Win 32 PC or Win XP embedded thin client to connect to View Manager for virtual desktop access VDM Client for Linux → VMware View Client for Linux
Client used to install on Linux thin clients to connect to View Manager for virtual desktop access 
VMware released VMware View 3, a new product? Yes and no, the number tells us it's version 3, but the name is new. Let's examine that. VMware View is a VDI product and it does offline and online desktops/laptops, maybe you recall two previous products of VMware: ACE (manager) - offline portable/virtual desktop management) - and VDM 2 (yes here it is the predecessor of version 3) a VDI Broker/management software for VDI solutions. Combine these two and add some extra features from the Lab Manager product (linked clones) and you have VMware View 3 with the VMware View Composer. Why View?
It's the users perspective that's responsible for it. In the database world a view is a simplified representation of a data structure, translating this into the virtualization language you may call it a simplified representation of an infrastructure, to be more specific it is just that part of the (desktop) system that counts to organizations nothing more and nothing less. Nice to see that this solution moves up towards the expectations the market has. Also the possible combination of ThinApp which is stimulated by the enterprise edition is one to watch! Too bad Softgrid (or as it officially is called Microsoft Application Virtualization) already has a strong position in the current market. Some evangelism is needed in favor of ThinApp I believe. That reminds me of the upcoming Virtual Friday in the Netherlands... Several clients I spoke with recently are really optimistic regarding to VDI but didn't want to buy two different solutions to manage their on- and offline desktops (ACE/VDM 2). With this product convincing them will get much easier, I'm glad it's here and will give it a try soon. The official talk from VMware's website: With VMware View 3, IT organizations can “decouple” a desktop from specific physical devices or locations to create a personalized view of a user’s desktop, applications, and data – called “myView” – that is securely accessible from almost any device, at any time. By hosting these virtual desktop images in the datacenter using the industry-leading virtualization and management platform, VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware View 3 enables IT personnel to provision and manage thousands of virtual desktops simply, securely, and with substantially lower operating costs. VMware View 3 is a major step in VMware’s vClient Initiative, announced at VMworld 2008 in September, to solve the “desktop dilemma.” As described by VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz, the desktop dilemma is the business choice of whether to provide thick or thin clients for employees. Thick clients, or fully loaded PCs, give employees a rich set of applications in their desktop environment, but are a management nightmare because applications can be distributed across thousands of PCs that must be provisioned, updated, patched and secured individually. Thin clients are cheaper, more secure, and more cost-effective to manage, but traditionally have not been able to deliver the richness, flexibility, or compatibility of a thick client. Most businesses provide thin clients only for employees such as call center staff who can be productive in a more stripped-down environment. VMware View 3 solves this dilemma by combining the benefits of both approaches – delivering rich, personalized virtual desktops to any device (whether thick or thin), while simplifying management and securing endpoints with virtual desktops hosted in the datacenter. VMware View 3 is a family of products available in two editions: - VMware View 3, Enterprise Edition: includes VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition and VMware View Manager 3, a flexible desktop management server enabling IT administrators to quickly provision and tightly control user access.
- VMware View 3, Premier Edition: includes VMware Infrastructure Enterprise Edition, VMware View Manager 3, VMware ThinApp for agentless application virtualization and VMware View Composer, a new product that enables IT staff to create multiple virtual desktops from a single image, increasing the speed of provisioning desktops and reducing storage requirements.
12/3/2008 
A little more than a week and the Dutch VMware Usergroup (VMUG) Event 2008 will set off. The current registered number of attendees exceeds 500 already. A sneakpreview for what is going to happen on the 12th of December at Nieuwegein (near Utrecht in the Netherlands): - 18 different breakout sessions;
- Appealing subjects like: servervirtualization, storage, VMware virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), VMware site recovery manager (SRM), programming/scripting and 3rd party tools;
- VMware/Powershell workshop;
- I love VMware sticker contest (send in a photo of the "I love VMware" sticker to vmugfoto <at> vmug.nl have a change of winning a Wii!)
 - An extended sponsor exhibition: the VMUG exchange;
- The opportunity to speak to fellow VMUG members;
- Closing and a drink;
More info: VMUG Site. Seats are limited, there are only a few left. Register here 
VKernel today released version 2 of SearchMyVM, the free “Google-like” search utility that quickly helps you find information within your rapidly expanding VMware ESX environments. This new version includes the #1 feature you asked for -- the ability to export searches to CSV format reports that you can print, email, and use to quickly document your infrastructure. SearchMyVM instantly deploys exactly like each one of VKernel’s virtual appliances. With a “Google-like” search interface, you can quickly run queries to find the info you are looking for. Some examples include: - Show me all VMs that have snapshots – important because snapshots can take up a huge amount of disk space
- Show me all VMs that have a CD-ROM drive attached – VMotion and DRS will not work if a CD drive is mounted
- Show me all VMs that have old versions of VMtools installed – extremely hard to keep track of in growing environments
It's free and available for download here 11/26/2008 Bob Plankers from lone sysadmin mentioned that Vmware only will support 64-bit hardware for the host in future releases. Begin quote: Future versions of VMware ESX/ESXi will only run on 64-bit-capable CPUs. You will still be able to run 32-bit guest OSes, but the ESX console OS will only work on CPUs capable of Intel VT & EM64T. This is a big deal for two reasons: 1. Dell doesn’t let you enable VT on anything but the PowerEdge 6850, and all ninth-generation servers (x9xx) and beyond. There are a lot of Dell PowerEdge 1850/2850s out there that will still be in use over the next few years. I suspect equipment from other manufacturers, like HP, is similarly affected. This means a lot of people will be stuck at current ESX levels (ESX 3.5.x) for a while until they can get new hardware. That also means that if you want to use some of the new features, like Continuous Availability, you might have to budget for an upgrade. 2. It’s pretty common to recycle old hardware down into test environments, but now you might not be able to do that in the next replacement cycle. If you have, or will have, hardware capable of Intel VT in production make sure you’ve done something to make your VMware test environment VT-capable, too. Even just budgeting now for a VT-capable test server is a good proactive move, to be purchased once the software is actually released. I have no idea when the next version of ESX will ship, but it’s worth thinking about this sort of stuff now so you can budget for it and have a plan[0]. Even if you decide that the plan is to do nothing and wait. If you want to test your CPUs to see if they will support 64-bit OSes you can use the VMware CPU Identification Utility. It’s a bootable ISO image that will tell you what you need to know. To reiterate: ESX console OS going 64-bit, you will still be able to run 32-bit guest OSes, you will need recent hardware to support the 64-bit console OS, and VMware has a tool to tell you where you stand. End quote 11/21/2008
In case you hadn't heard the news yet, The Brian Madden Company has just been acquired by TechTarget, Inc. Madden has been covering Citrix technology for a while now, even before the whole Virtualization craze when it was just plain old application presentation -- not quite as cool as today's application virtualization bucket.
If you have any skin in the game of desktop virtualization, I'm sure you've heard of Brian Madden, his BrianMadden.com web site, or his independent deskop virtualization conference held in Chicago - The BriForum event. Madden is also known for publishing virtualization books such as the popular VI3: Advanced Technical Design Guide from Herold, Oglesby, and Laverick.
So what happens next? ... Read more at VMblog
From BrianMadden.com:
I'm happy to announce that we have been acquired by TechTarget. This is really cool because it means that Gabe and I can focus 100% on writing and interacting with the community, and we don't have to be weighed down by all the operational minutia of running a business.
For those of you unfamiliar with TechTarget, they're an IT Media Company. They have something like 60 IT-related websites, including IT Knowledge Exchange, NotebookReview.com, LabMice.net, and all those "Search" news sites (SearchWinIT.com, etc.) They also host about 300 events and conferences per year. (I actually attended one in DC today about desktop virtualization, with presentations from Mark Minasi and Barb Goldworm. Very cool!)
Read more at BrianMadden.com
Technorati Tags: virtualization,brianmadden,acquisition 11/19/2008 Some time ago VMware together with Intel and AMD announced that they were taking steps towards enabling cross-platform vmotions. The intention was to move a vm from one host (intel) to another host (amd) with vmotion technology. The companies now announced they dismiss their plans towards cross-migration plans. The reason why this effort is currently on hold is the way the migration becomes available. The idea is to hide all instructions from both processor types that differ. In that way you have two "equal" processors/instruction sets. Because the instructions that differ between the two architectures are growing in numbers these instructions are more and more being used. Some of these instruction are only detected by initialization (start/boot), if you then migrate a vm to another architecture the OS might still think that certain instructions are available and will do calls to these instructions. If this happens the VM becomes unstable and might crash depending on the instructions used. In terms of High available or fault tolerance (ESX4) this is something you don't want. AMD however said that it nevertheless will put a lot of effort in making it possible in the future, not surprisingly because they want to regain market share they lost with the delayed AMD quad core introduction. Hopefully both parties do agree on developing some sort of solution for this, because the demands from the market are still there. I had the pleasure to meet the guys of Transitive in february this year on VMworld Europe, they had a giveaway each day where they organized a prizedraw for an apple notebook because they introduced the Rosetta Software with which you can run POWERPC apps on your x86 (Apple) hardware. Transitive's QuickTransit cross-platform virtualization solutions allow applications created for one CPU and OS to run on different platforms without modifications to source code or binaries. Yesterday IBM announced the plans to acquire of Transitive. This acquisition is part of IBM's strategy to help clients optimize the efficiency and productivity of their computing infrastructure and improve the utilization of the servers that run them. With this translation technology, along with existing migration capabilities, IBM systems give businesses a faster, easier path for server consolidation to reduce operational expenses, floorspace and energy costs. Pano Logic a delivers a "zero software, all hardware" client solution as they call it. Pano Logic is a developer of a server-based desktop virtualization solution. On november 17th Pano Logic announced Pano Virtual Desktop Solution (VDS) 2.5. VDS is a three piece concept. - A piece of hardware (client device) without chips (software) that resides on the desktop of the user and is connected to external devices such as keyboard/mouse/video and to the network.
- On the server side there is a Pano Manager. A web-based management interface, deployed on your VMware VI3 infrastructure which enables administrators to automate virtual desktop deployment by integrating with existing directory services and VMware Virtual Center.
- A Pano Desktop Service which is a lightweight service residing within each Windows desktop virtual machine that links peripherals attached to the Pano device to the unmodified native Windows drivers.
In the new version Pano said goobye to the Microsoft RDP-protocol and delivers a near native windows experience. Pano VDS 2.5 is now available with pricing starting at $300 for a single Pano desktop. Quote from Virtualization.info: 
Almost one month after VirtualCenter, VMware updates also ESX to version 3.5 Update 3. Pretty much like for VirtualCenter, this new build (123630) is mainly for bugfixes. Nonetheless there are some important improvements: - Support for 20 vCPUs / core (previous limit was 8 or 11, in case of VDI workloads)
- Support for Solaris 10 Update 5, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7 and Ubuntu 8.04.1
- Support for Broadcom 5771x 10GB NICs (despite the TOE aboard is not supported)
- Support for Broadcom HT1000 and Intel ICH-7 SATA controllers
- Experimental support for Intel MFSYS25 SAS networked controller
- Experimental support for a new VMDK Recovery Tool (a script that recovers deleted VMDK data stores on VMFS volumes)
- and more
Download the trial here.
The Dutch VMUG organizes the 4th Official Dutch VMUG Meeting on december 12th 2008. The sessions will be mostly in Dutch (except those with English speaking presenters), but even if your not capable of understanding the Dutch Language there will probably be someone there to help you understand the basics. I have already signed up for the event and will give 'act de presence'. For more information and registration look here, don't wait too long to register because places are limited to 600 and the event is almost sold out. The meeting has a couple of timeslots and three different 'tracks' for each timeslot I have already made a personal schedule that I'd like to share: Keynote - VMware
Richard Garsthagen, VMware ESX Server en Virtual Center Server Best Practices
Willem van Engeland, VMware VMUG Sessie: Streaming Smackdown 2009
Ruben Spruijt - VMUG / PQR Virtualisatie en Storage
Frederik Vos - XTG Virtual Center Database - There is more than meets the eye
Bouke Groenescheij - VMUG/Jume Virtual Desktop Infrastructure in het Onderwijs (Education)
Leo Smit - Penta College Quest subsidairy Vizioncore released a new major upgrade of vConverter 4.0 since the acquisition of invirtus by mothership Quest in mid 2007. As of november 9 2008, Vizioncore is shipping this new version of vConverter. 11/17/2008 Recently VMware announced VMware Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP). After introducing vCloud and the vClient initiative, VMware is entering the mobile market. A for VMware new type of hypervisor based on a non-x86 architecture like MIPS and ARM processor architecture has been added to the portfolio. Some time ago VMware acquired a company called TRANGO Virtual Processors which develops a hypervisor using paravirtualization for use with Mobile devices (embedded software). VMware positions it as a mobile (handheld) device solution, Trango on their website also mentions the automotive industry as a possible benifitiator. 
The strategy behind the hypervisor for mobile devices is to stimulate the application development on mobile platforms by shortening the time to market through seperating the hardware from the OS & applications. Besides the stimulation of mobile app development the possibility of running two different and isolated profiles next to each other is a strong selling point. This way corporate and personal configurations of the mobile device can run next to each other on the same mobile device. From security and manageability point of view this is an interesting feature for businesses dealing with questions wether or not to allow mobile devices on their (wireless) network. Using a specific business profile controlled by the business in a way reduces risks. Looking into the future and combining it with techniques like VDI(offline desktop) or ACE this is a huge step in mobile device management and control. It will make it possible for the user to use a device how he/she likes (personal profile) and on the other hand (company profile) complying to rules and settings issued by the company by running an (always) up to date profile/vm. 11/11/2008 Lots of people contacted me lately about my previous article about my Poweredge T105 running VMware ESXi. Most of them were concerned about the system being able to run ESXi properly. It seems that a lot of people have posted items on their Blog or in a Forum about the difficulties they experienced running ESX on a Poweredge T105. Am I lucky? I'm not sure, the one thing I do know is that I have it running for a couple of months now. An issue I can confirm is that you have to have a certain buildnumber (or above) to get it running, i.e. one of the earlier versions of ESXi did not run properly as stated in one of my earlier posts. When the T105 came to the market the version of ESXi available at that time, did not recognize most of the hardware that's inside the T105 (broadcom nic, SATA controller etc.). The version of ESXi(3.5.0 build-110271) I use does not have any difficulties of whatsoever. The PowerEdge T105 runs ESXi from a USB-stick plugged in onto the motherboard inside the case. It's just plug and play, no additional drivers were used. To give you an idea of how it looks like (and proof of operation) I made some screenshots I'd like to share with you.    
Looking into the future I think more and more hardware is able to run ESX(i), that's logical if you look at the strategy Vmware has developed in the client corner of IT. Vmware's currently developing a client hypervisor as part of the VDI/Desktop strategy and looking at the different hardware vendors producing laptop/client hardware the support for other hardware in that hypervisor which probably is based on ESXi (just guessing here) must be broadened. It's most likely that you can run your ESXi hypervisor on nearly any piece of hardware in the near future.
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