Well yesterday vSphere was launched, what turned out to be one of the worst kept secrets ever. Most of what had been announced was already known by anyone following the industry but was a significant milestone in the virtualisation industry.
New features in version 4 of VMware’s product include FT (Fault Tolerance) that will give you an extra level of protection for mission critical VM’s , meaning in the event of hardware failure a second ghost VM will take over immediatly with no downtime! Distributed Power Management to allow servers to be intellegently powered down when the resource is no longer needed, this feature was introducted in 3.5 but was only experimental, thin provisied virtual disks, host profiles, distributed virtual switches, virtual centre linked mode plus lots lots more. VMware have a list of new features here >> http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/upgrade-center/overview.html#whatsnew
The big names from Intel, Dell and HP all joined Paul Maritz president and CEO of VMware on stage for the announcement with some impressive figures such as
About 30 percent increase in consolidation ratios, further decreasing infrastructure cost per application.1 Up to 50 percent storage savings with VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning, which minimizes storage overprovisioning by enabling virtual machines to consume storage only as needed. Accrued across all VMware vSphere customers, these storage savings would free up enough storage to save up to 50 times the number of pictures currently on Facebook. 2 Up to 20 percent additional power and cooling savings with VMware Distributed Power Management which uses VMware VMotion to automatically place all virtual machines on as few physical servers as possible without compromising service levels, and power down physical servers that are not needed. The power savings with VMware Distributed Power Management across all VMware vSphere 4 customers over one year could power a country the size of Denmark for 10 days.3
All very impressive for a software update! VMWare still weren’t commiting to a realease date other than this quater, but speculation is it will be released to public on 21st May, we shall see.
There is already a huge amount of information out there and VMware Land has put together a compehensive list of links for you to find out all about vSphere 4 >> http://vmware-land.com/vSphere_Links.html
VMware official press release >> http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vsphere-launch.html
vSphere product page >> http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/index.html
vSphere Podcasts >> http://www.vmware.com/resources/podcasts/vsphere.html
Virtualised Reality 