VMware Expands SVVP Certifications

Wednesday, October 15, 2008 in Microsoft, Virtualization by slowe | 1 comment

As I discussed a few weeks ago, VMware’s original SVVP certification was limited to x86 guests with up to 4GB of RAM running on AMD Opteron-based systems. So, while VMware was the first third-party hypervisor validated under SVVP, their validation was a bit limited.

Thanks to Mike DiPetrillo via Twitter, I learned that VMware’s SVVP validation has now been expanded to include the following:

  • Both AMD Opteron and Intel-based systems
  • Both x64 and x86 guests
  • Validation of x64 guests running up to 16GB of RAM

The full list is found here.

Unfortunately, x86 guests are still limited to 4GB of RAM, but I don’t really foresee that being a major problem as I suspect the vast majority of x86 guest workloads will have 4GB or less of RAM.

Let’s hope that VMware continues to expand the SVVP certifications to include more processors (currently limited to 4 CPUs, which I’m guessing is 4 vCPUs) and more memory for both x86 and x64 workloads. Right now VMware’s list of SVVP certifications is trounced by Citrix’s list, which boasts higher CPU and higher RAM limits.

Tags: , , , ,

  1. Mike DiPetrillo’s avatar

    Mike DiPetrillo on Thursday, October 16, 2008 at 8:11 am

    Scott,

    VMware is working around the clock to expand the list of certified configurations. Each test setup requires 4 servers with 128 GB of RAM in order to run the certification loads and drive them. It took a while to find such hosts and get them in (there’s an industry wide lead time on them). Needless to say we’ve got more than enough hardware now. Each one of these test runs takes about a week to run through. It’s all automated. After that you submit the test results to Microsoft and they approve them to make sure the tests ran completely and accurately. There’s usually a couple of day turnaround for that – sometimes faster. Microsoft has been good about pushing these tests through. After the test is approved it can take up to a week before they get posted on the website. They only update the site on certain days and depending on when the test gets approved you may have to wait. For example, this last set of tests got approved last Thursday and got posted to the site the following Wednesday.

    Hopefully that sheds some light on the process and when you might be able to see more certifications posted to the site. We have a whole team and lab dedicated to getting these certifications done. I’m sure you’ll see them popping up on a regular basis now.

    THanks for posting the updates to let everyone know they’re there! This Twitter thing does work. :)