VMware launched vSphere 4 today with great fanfare and lots of smiley people in blue shirts. There were no major surprises for anyone who's been following VMware closely for the past while. Big emphasis on (improved) cost reduction through (vSphere's) virtualisation technology - which is no surprise given the current economic environment.
The big push that I got from the launch event was "100% Virtualisation" i.e. now VMware claim you can virtualise every workload including your (demanding) DBMSs and OLTP applications. VMs can now have 8 vCPUs with 256GB RAM and can yield 30Gb/s and 300,000+ IOPS. That's pretty good, and may even suit analysis applications that need to run just such machines for hours (or even days) to process TBs of data - think large telcos mining their data. (As I'm on the subject, if you want to learn more on data mining, here's a good introduction to data mining that was given at a seminar I attended in Dublin some time ago.)
Other features in vSphere include zero down time with fault tolerance i.e. a VM runs on one ESX host with a shadow copy "lock stepped" (VMware's words - not mine) on another host. If the primary host dies, the VM fails over instantaneously to the other host. They demo'd this with a BES Server. It's been around for ages though - I viewed a more technical demo months ago. Check it out if you want more detail on VMware's (then pre-release) fault tolerance. It's great to see this feature finally making it to an end product.
Another feature is "thin provisioning" - and they did a Storage vMotion demo where a VM was migrated (live) from one datastore without thin provisioning to another datastore with thin provisioning. This reduced the size of the VM from 4GB to 3GB - pretty good, but it'll be interesting to see what real world yields will be. It's the like of these features that (still) gives VMware the edge over the competition.
If you want to see the complete hour and a half webcast, it should be available here soon.
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