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VMware Releases vSphere 4.1 & Licensing Changes

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Today is the big day that vSphere 4.1 is finally released. This dot release is jam packed with new features that some of my clients have been testing for the past six months in beta. The ones that have been strongly received by my enterprise clients include:

  • Increased vSphere scalability (2-3x increase in vCenter scale, see config maximums pdf for details)
  • Storage IO Control (SIOC)
  • Additional Storage Statistics in vCenter
  • NFS Performance Enhancements
  • Network IO Control (NIOC)
  • VMware HA Healthcheck and Operational Status
  • Host Affinity Rules
  • vMotion Enhancements (5x better vMotion performance, note that small v… 🙂 )
  • Memory Compression
  • USB Device Passthrough from an ESX/ESXi Host to a Virtual Machine (a peer of mine said he was amazed at how every USB device he could think to throw at it just work, though I’m sure someone will find exceptions to this.)

There was also some changes in the vSphere licensing. Specifically formalization of vSphere Kits and Editions:

  • Kits are pre-packaged for specific use case needs.
  • Editions are the different tiers of of increasing product capability to cover the spectrum from small businesses to global enterprises. There were some feature changes between Editions as well.

vSphere 4.1 Editions

Update: Here is Steve Herrod’s blog post on this release as well as Bogomil Balkansky’s blog post.  I also forgot to mention that free ESXi is now being referred to as vSphere Hypervisor, the first tier in the above diagram.

Additional product releases coinciding with vSphere 4.1:

  • vCenter Site Recover Manager (SRM) 4.1 was released today as well.  This version of SRM is compatible with vSphere 4.1 and contains a number of new features, see release notes.
  • VMware Studio 2.1 was released today as well.  This version is compatible with vSphere 4.1 and adds support for new Linux GOS and OVF versions as well as a slew of other features, see release notes.
  • vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3 was release today as well.  This version is compatible with VC 4.1 as well as additional features, see release notes.

Virtualization Round Up 20100608

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I know it’s been a long drought of round ups out here on the range…which means I have a rather larger backlog of items to share, some of these might be items you came across earlier but I thought were worth repeating.

With all the projects and activities I have going on (and unfortunately for the blog, too many VMware related ones being the kind I can’t talk about…yet), I’ve found it more difficult to post these Virtualization Round Up’s on a regular basis.  I anticipate it will only get more difficult moving forward, especially with the arrival of Baby Mini-G in about 3 months.

So, this will be the last regular round up for the foreseeable future (I may sneak one in now and again when big things happen).

To get more regular pointers to virtualization items of interest, follow me on Twitter as I will be switching to posting these types of links there during working hours with the hashtag “VRU”.  Note: I am crossing the streams in my twitter feed…

VMware Specific Links

General Virtualization & Cloud Links

  • Massimo Re Ferre’ recently talked about the Public Cloud adoption curve and how history repeats.
  • It may come as not surprise that EMC’s IT team is working toward 100% virtualization (VMware’s IT team is at about 98%  😉 ).  But did you know that EMC’s IT team is blogging about their Journey to the Private Cloud?
  • Vittorio Viarengo has some More Best Practices for running IT Production virtualized.