VMware Launches vSphere 4 for Internal Clouds

 

VMware Inc. unveiled vSphere 4, its cloud computing operating system. VSphere provides a set of application and infrastructure services as well as integrated virtualization management tools. A number of VMware business partners announced their products and services in support of the new operating system.

Focal Points:

• VMware unveiled its next generation virtualization platform, vSphere 4. The operating system will aggregate and holistically manage large pools of infrastructure – processors, storage and networking – as a seamless, flexible and dynamic operating environment. According to the company, the new release offers about a 30 percent improvement in consolidation ratios versus VMware Infrastructure 3, up to 50 percent storage savings with vStorage Thin Provisioning, and up to 20 percent additional power and cooling savings over the prior release. The number of virtual processors per virtual machine increases from four to eight while the amount of memory per virtual machine expands to 255 GB from 64 GB. VSphere 4 supports up to 10 virtual NICs per virtual machine and delivers a threefold increase in network throughput (from 9 GB/sec to 30 GB/sec). The operating system can pool together up to 32 physical servers with up to 2,048 processor cores, 1,280 virtual machines, 32 TB of RAM, 16 petabytes of storage, and 8,000 network ports. There are six different offerings, with the entry level VSphere 4 Essentials prices starting at $795 for three physical servers or $166 per processor. At the upper end VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus is priced at $3,495 per processor and includes the full range of vSphere 4 features for transforming datacenters into internal cloud computing environments. VMware plans on making vSphere 4 generally available late in the second quarter of 2009.
• More than 250 independent software vendors (ISVs) will extend their support to VMware vSphere 4. These include mission-critical products from IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG. Partners such as BMC Software Inc., CA Inc., EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP), IBM, Symantec Corp. and Tripwire Inc. have built solutions for managing heterogeneous environments that integrate with the VMware vCenter suite of management products. Networking vendors such as Brocade Communications Systems Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., F5 Networks Inc., HP, and Riverbed Technology Inc. are delivering solutions that work with vSphere. HP announced the integration of vSphere with its Adaptive Infrastructure portfolio of offerings. VMware is also reselling Cisco's Nexus 1000V virtual switch.
• Business partners such as Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.; IBM ISS; McAfee Inc.; EMC's RSA division, Symantec and Trend Micro Inc. extended their products to complement vSphere 4 security offerings. Overall VMware said that more than 500 technology partners supported the launch. In addition, more than 22,000 channel partners will provide customers with a wide variety of applications, cloud services, desktop solutions, management solutions, networking, security solutions, servers and storage devices that interoperate with the vSphere 4 operating system.

Experton Group believes the advances in vSphere will reduce the cost of implementing virtualization and increase adoption of VMware in development environments. However, until customers are convinced vSphere fully addresses their I/O handling, performance and security concerns, there will only be minor gains in VMware production environments. Because of the magnitude of the release, the repackaging of a number of features into suites, and the new variations of products from VMware business partners, there are bound to be a number of initial code issues and unexpected interoperability problems. IT executives interested in virtualization should understand the functionality in the new VMware release and associated partner offerings and determine if, when and where vSphere should be incorporated into their IT architecture and environment.