VMware unveils vSphere 4

VMware has announced the launch of VMware vSphere 4, which it says is the industry's first operating system for building the internal cloud, enabling the delivery of efficient, flexible and reliable IT as a service.

VMware vSphere 4 will aggregate and holistically manage large pools of infrastructure - processors, storage and networking - as a seamless, flexible and dynamic operating environment. Any application - an existing enterprise application or a next-generation application - runs more efficiently and with guaranteed service levels on VMware vSphere 4.

For enterprises, VMware vSphere 4 will bring the power of cloud computing to the data center. For hosting service providers, VMware vSphere 4 will enable a more economic and efficient path to delivering cloud services that are compatible with customers' internal cloud infrastructures. Over time, VMware will support dynamic federation between internal and external clouds, enabling ‘private’ cloud environments that span multiple data centers and/or cloud providers.

VMware vSphere 4 brings the capability to aggregate large number of virtual machines and large amounts of physical infrastructure into a single logical resource pool or ‘compute plant’ on a cloud scale in order to create ‘the mainframe of the 21st century.’ VMware vSphere 4 can pool together up to:

- 32 physical servers with up to 2048 processor cores
- 1,280 virtual machines
- 32 TB of RAM
- 16 petabytes of storage
- 8,000 network ports

VMware vSphere 4 enables efficient operational control of these very powerful compute plants with new large scale management features such as VMware Host Profiles and VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch that allow easy standardization of server security, storage and network settings; automating configuration management and reducing errors due to misconfiguration.

VMware vSphere 4 also brings uncompromised control over application service levels - enabling the right levels of availability, security and scalability to all applications independent of the OS or application architecture.

In terms of downtime, VMware says that vSphere 4 will deliver zero downtime and zero data loss protection against hardware failures with VMware Fault Tolerance. Planned downtime is also minimized with VMware Storage VMotion, available with a new administrator interface, which provides live migration of virtual machine disk files across heterogeneous networked storage types.

http://www.vmware.com/go/vsphere

•Date:21st April 2009• Region: World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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