After a great deal of speculation and expectations, VMware finally made its big announcement this morning. And they did not disappoint, with the unveiling of VMware vSphere 4, "the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud."
Originally coined as the “virtual data center operating system,” vSphere takes virtualization to an entirely new level. Last week our team had the opportunity to spend three days with VMware and other members of the partner community, attending labs and presentations relating to the details of the vSphere release. Today, I can finally talk about the details and give some insight on the developments.
VMware’s transformation of the virtual infrastructure into the new vSphere offering is a little bit more than a simple "upgrade" from ESX 3.5 to 4.0. To start with, this release will standardize VMware on a 64 bit hypervisor, rather than the current 32 bit version. Also, the management console is now separate from the hypervisor, running in a VM, which will reduce the size and attack footprint for vSphere.
Distributed power management is now fully supported, and plays an integral part in the dynamic data center and vSphere’s ability to intelligently manage data center resources for optimal, efficient performance.
Speaking of managing resources effectively, let’s not gloss over my favorite part of the entire announcement: fault tolerance (FT). Within an HA-enabled resource pool, you can now keep a shadow copy of any virtual machine in sync with vLockstep technology to ensure that any failures to the production virtual machine do not impact the business.
The best part is that when you failover to that shadow copy (seamlessly, BTW), vSphere will spin up another shadow copy immediately on another host to ensure you do not lose your fault tolerance. Don’t worry, we’re going to break these technologies down in greater detail with future posts.
But let’s also touch on another enhancement that the user community has been asking for. License management, which has traditionally been a very sensitive and time consuming set of tasks, is now simplified greatly and integrated into vCenter.
Remember the days of the license server, and it’s long and tedious license file? Well, now you can forget about them. Simplified license keys and management will take much of the hassle out of the license management process. So, your previous 20-step process is now only three steps. Not too shabby, VMware!
OK, I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand long blog posts, so I’m going to cut this one here. Keep an eye out for the next set of posts where we’ll break down the details on each of these features. Oh, and don’t forget to register for Virtualization Exchange on May 6th, where we’ll definitely be breaking these parts down in an open forum, and you can bounce your questions off the experts.
More to come …
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