(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Virtualization solutions provider VMware (www.vmware.com) has unveilled the latest version of the award-winning VMware virtualization platform, VMware vSphere 4.1, as well as an expanded portfolio of virtualization management solutions.
According to VMware’s Tuesday announcement, VMware has added dramatic scalability, performance, and management capabilities to what was already one of the most powerful virtualization platforms on the market, providing an ideal foundation for cloud computing.
“Virtualization occupies an increasingly central position within IT strategy as the cornerstone of modern infrastructures and the foundation for cloud computing,” VMware virtualization and cloud platform senior vice president and general manager Raghu Raghuram said in a statement. “As the market leader, VMware vSphere is redefining the economics of computing, while helping customers to achieve the levels of utilization and automation that underpin the promise of cloud computing.”
The VMware vSphere 4.1 and the VMware vCenter product family have formed the cornerstones of the private and public cloud environments of many customers and service providers, enabling them to revolutionize the way they develop, provision and consume IT services.
With new memory management and expanded resource pooling capabilities, VMware vSphere 4.1 promises to accelerate the evolution of data centres and service providers into cloud computing environments.
Scalability has been massively upgraded in the latest version of VMware vSphere, with customers able to aggregate twice the computing resources within a single pool. VMware vCenter Server can now manage as many as 10,000 active VMs concurrently — three times as many as before.
Up to 25 per cent better performance and reduced cost per application.
With the addition of new memory compression technology, VMware vSphere 4.1 now preserves the performance of systems under heavy load, resulting in an up-to-25-percent performance boost over previous approaches.
Memory compression also contributes to further increased consolidation ratios in VMware vSphere, which already has the highest consolidation levels in the market. New compression features reduces customers’ cost-per-application, a critical measure of value delivered through virtualization.
Speed and scale enhancements to VMware vMotion deliver superior platform response and availability. The increased agility enables the migration of virtual machines up to five times faster, and a many as eight concurrent vMotion events can be run per server pair.
The the launch of VMware vSphere 4.1 come new controls that allow better alignment of storage and network I/O resources to business priority. VMware vSphere network and storage I/O controls provide granular control over how applications access shared storage and network resources. Administrators can set quality of service priorities per virtual machine and the software automatically manages resource allocation accordingly.
According to the company, VMware vSphere already supported more operating systems, devices, applications, and service providers than any other virtualization solution. New VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration, however, enables tighter integration with solutions from VMware‘s storage partners to increase the efficiency and performance of the platform in cloud environments.
VMware vCenter helps customers further reduce the complexity of their IT environment, while increasing operational efficiency through policy-based management of provisioning, deployment, and performance optimization. VMware has broadened its management portfolio to deliver a complete set of solutions to automate the management of dynamic virtualized systems.
VMware vCenter Configuration Manager (formerly known as “EMC Ionix Application Stack Manager” and “EMC Ionix Server Configuration Manager”) ensures policy based compliance and avoids configuration drift by automating manual configuration tasks across virtual and physical servers and workstations.
VMware vCenter Application Discovery Manager (formerly “EMC Ionix Application Discovery Manager”) quickly and accurately maps application dependencies to accelerate datacentre moves, precisely plan infrastructure consolidations, and confidently virtualize business-critical applications.
VMware has also announced a new per-VM licensing model for the VMware vCenter management solutions only, aligning licensing costs to the number of virtual machines being managed rather than to the physical hardware. As the virtual machine rapidly replaces physical hardware as the standard measure of infrastructure deployments, the per-VM licensing model reduces complexity, offers better alignment between software costs and benefits delivered, and can better support customers porting computing environments across diverse hardware configurations. This new vCenter licensing model will take effect on September 1, 2010.
VMware vSphere 4.1 is currently available starting at $83 per processor for small and medium-sized business applications, to $3,495 per processor for full enterprise editions capable of the most demanding environments.
