A big day for VMware today with the latest release of their flagship virtualisation product – vSphere.
VMware vSphere 4.1 improves on VMware vSphere 4.0 and has the following major new enhancements and features:
vCompute
- Memory Compression—Reclaim application performance by up to 30 percent by reducing memory contention as a bottleneck
- DRS Host Affinity—Set granular policies for virtual machine movement (for example, restricting a virtual machine to a specific host due to licensing impact)
vStorage
- Storage I/O Control—Set storage quality-of-service priorities for each virtual machine to guarantee access to storage resources
- Performance Reporting—Deliver key storage performance statistics regardless of storage protocol
- Array Integration—Leverage new protocol interfaces between VMware and storage arrays for faster performance for vSphere operations such as Storage vMotion events and virtual machine provisioning.
vNetwork
- Network I/O Control—Set network quality-of-service priorities per flow type for guaranteed access to network resources.
Scalability
- “Cloud Scale”*—Fully virtualise the datacenter and scale at least twice as large than ever before
- Virtual machines per cluster: 3,000 (more than a 200 percent increase)
- Hosts per vCenter Server instance: 1,000 (more than a 300 percent increase)
- Virtual machines per vCenter Server instance: 10,000 powered on (more than a 300 percent increase), 15.000 registered
*All scale numbers above show the new 4.1 metric, as well as the increase from the vSphere 4.0 release (4.0 numbers are above in the same pillar).
A complete list of all new features can be found here.