VMware has been on the road talking up their new vSphere 4.0 offering. I haven’t been able to personally attend one of these, but Conrad Agramont was able to attend one in Virginia recently and made some good field notes. Here are a few highlights according to Conrad:

• VMware vSphere 4.0
• • (Marketing Vision) IT as a Service, Delivered through Private Cloud
  • • Apps move between Private and Public Clouds
    • They call their “Cloud OS” a “Software Mainframe”.
  • Infrastructure Platform
  • • Worked with Cisco for the Networking component
    • Application Services
    • Infrastructure Services
  • “Open” via OVF format, published API’s.
  • Over 170 new features from version 3.0
  • Next and Future Processor enhancements increase the efficiency
  • vCompute
  • • A single vSphere 4.0 host can reach 300k+ disk i/o per host, 30 Gb/s of network usage
    • 8000 db transactions/ sec per vm
    • SPECweb2005 score of 44,000
  • vStorage

There were several audience questions as well. Here are a few Conrad noted:

Is ESX 3.5 to vSphere 4.0 an upgrade or install? It’s an upgrade and “less painful” then ESX 3.0 to ESX 3.5. It’s an in-place upgrade. You first need to move off your VM’s (use vMotion), upgrade, and then move them back.

What is the release schedule for the “add ons”? Chargeback is soon to release and was targeted towards ESX 3.5 (VMware rep was unsure if it’s also compatible for vSphere 4.0)

Does vSphere handled “Distributed Clustering” (e.g. HPC)? No, but this is something they are working on. Probably 18+ months away

What’s the best way to measure performance when comparing hardware and virtual machines?This should be measured at the application level and use the appropriate monitoring application to measure and compare. For the VM itself, vSphere 4.0 provides a new feature with performance monitor counters.

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