vSphere 4 offers greater control and efficiency over previous VMware releases, while continuing to allow customers a wide variety of operating system and application choices for deployment on internal clouds.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) – A month after unveiling its next-generation operating system for building internal clouds, virtualization solutions provider VMware (www.vmware.com) has made VMware vSphere 4 general availability, ahead of schedule and with the support of an extensive partner ecosystem and customers around the globe.
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According to VMware’s announcement, VMware vSphere 4 offers a wide range of new performance and scalability improvements over the previous generation, VMware Infrastructure 3, including greater control and efficiency, while preserving customer choice. VMware vSphere 4 can support resource intensive applications, such as large databases and Microsoft Exchange, to be deployed on internal clouds.
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Compared to VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware vSphere 4 offers up to 30 percent higher consolidation ratios, up to 50 percent storage savings, and up to 20 percent power savings.
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“With VMware vSphere 4, we are once again raising the bar significantly for businesses that desire to dramatically improve IT performance,” VMware server business unit vice president and general manager Raghu Raghuram said in a statement. “The cost savings associated with virtualization are undeniable, and as more customers standardize on VMware to drive 100 percent virtualization, they are realizing the additional benefits that our solutions deliver, including increased flexibility and agility.”
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VMware product line manager Leena Joshi said vSphere offers a more holistic approach to cloud deployment than its closest competitors including Microsoft, which in June 2008 entered the virtualization market with hypervisor-based vitualization platform Hyper-V. This focus on the aggregate lets vSphere manage large pools of infrastructure.
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“Hyper-V is basically a single-server hypervisor – you use it to partition your server into many virtual machines, but we at VMware are taking a distributed approach, a data center wide approach, a more responsible approach, if you will, in orchestrating resources across the data center and providing our customers with the ability to get the most efficient use of resources without having to spend a lot of time monitoring the environment,” Joshi said.
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Independent of hardware, operating system, application stack, and service providers, vSphere 4 gives customers great flexibility in what applications and services they run. vSphere 4 offers the broadest choice of guest operating systems compared to other virtualization solutions on the market, letting customers deploy their existing applications and future applications within internal or external clouds.
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“We provide the choice of any type of operating system – we basically have an operating system support level that is four-times that of Hyper-V,” Joshi said. “And we’re providing the additional benefit of any type of application on any type of service provider – you could turn your data center into a cloud internally or you could use VMware’s platform to provision applications externally, or you could use VMware virtual machines to take advantage of some of the external capacity without any of customization.”
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VMware president and chief executive officer Paul Maritz said his company has been at the forefront of virtualization since pioneering x86 system virtualization a decade ago. “VMware has delivered an impressive list of ‘industry-firsts’ — the first hypervisor, the first VMotion capability now synonymous with VMware, and the first platform for pooling servers, storage and network, allowing customers to decrease the capital and operating cost of computing by up to 60 to 70 percent,” Maritz said in a statement.
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“VMware vSphere 4 is the next evolution along this path of innovation,” Maritz continued. “By giving IT organizations a non-disruptive path to cloud computing, we will be leading our customers on a journey that delivers value every step of the way, delivering up to an additional 30 percent cost reduction today while enabling IT to provide reliable and adaptable IT services.”
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With pricing starting at $166 per processor, vSphere 4 expected to be generally available later in the second quarter of 2009. VMware will release six editions that offer a variety of features and price points to meet the needs of customers of different sizes.
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VMware plans on adding support for dynamic federation between internal and external clouds in the future, letting private cloud environments span multiple data centers and/or cloud providers.
