VMware vSphere 4 has been released, which is the next version of VMware ESX 3.5.
The product has 150 new features, and can achieve efficiency savings of around 50% compared to ESX 3.5.
The new product supports: 8 VCPUs, 256 GB RAM per VM, network speeds of 30Gb/s, and over 300K of IOPS.
The product claims to be able to handle even the toughest load types (Oracle databases, etc), aiming to achieve a 100% virtualized environment for customers.
It’s being pushed as the first “cloud operating system” to be available in the market.
This is not to be confused with what most people understand as cloud computing.
vSphere allows you to run private and federated clouds, where the underlying host servers become aggregated into a large pool which can be easily managed.
The new product packaging and pricing options are interesting as well, with prices starting at $166 per processor on the low end, or $3K for being able to run vSphere across 3 physical host servers with data protection, high availability, disaster recovery, simplified management, disk-based backups and other features.
There are also many interesting high-end features available in the enterprise edition packaging. See the edition comparison matrix for a full breakdown.
This is a big step forward for virtualization technology, and will extend the gap between VMware and Microsoft.
The link below will give you further information on VMware vSphere 4, and also includes a video of the product launch with demonstrations of a few of the powerful new features available.
http://vmware.com/products/vsphere/index.html
