The new VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) will be a product close to any System Administrators heart – managing your VM environment from pretty much anywhere via a mobile phone device such as a BlackBerry. So no more having to carry a laptop with a 3G or EDGE internet access card around with you when away for the day during the weekend or evening.

From vCMA you will be able to perform many of the actions you can whilst in front of vCenter such as:

• Perform a vMotion of VMs between ESX hosts.
• View various ESX hosts and Clusters.
• View Scheduled Tasks, Alarms and Events.
• Cycle power on a VM or ESX host..
• View VM hardware settings.
• View VM performance metrics.
• Action VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) plans.

There are plenty of other good things you can do via the interface also.

To use vCMA you will need to download and run a Virtual Appliance which will provide the interface to your vCenter.

The good news is that we don’t have to wait too long before we can trial this new product as VMware have announced that it will be available as a downloadable technology preview in April (2009) this year. 

Here is an important link well worth book marking as this is where you’ll be able to download it from and is also the location of the forum around vCMA:

http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/vcmobileaccess.

For more information on this announcement head on over to the VMTN Blog here.

Below is a video prepared by VMware that gives a good overview of the functionality we’ll be able to expect with this new product.  Worth checking out: