VMware launches vSphere 4 — what’s in it for customers?

On Monday, VMware kicked off its simulcast event detailing its new revolutionary cloud OS concept (vCloud) and made the official announcement around VMware vSphere 4, the company’s successor to the VI3 hypervisor and virtualization platform.

I must say, I really enjoyed the online event. I thought it was well done, and I know it was well received in the VMware community. Assuming the demonstrations in the live video feed were live, then the demos were a complete success — something that rarely happens at an event with a live studio audience.

And like most event keynotes that take place, this online event certainly had its own share of marketing/sales moments. But come on, did we expect anything less? Still, it was well done, very informative, and something cool to be a part of online. Kudos goes out to the VMware team.

One of the big messages coming out of VMware right now and presented throughout the online event centers on the cloud. In the opening of the event, vSphere was described as a revolutionary step and an evolutionary approach; and the new vSphere technology was being pitched as the “first cloud operating system.” And to further promote the technology, a who’s-who strolled onto the stage to discuss the passion surrounding this “evolutionary technology.” VMware CEO Paul Maritz and VMware CTO Steve Herrod were joined by John Chambers from Cisco, Pat Gelsinger from Intel, James Mouton from HP, and Michael Dell from Dell. Again and again, it was reinforced throughout the event via demonstrations, presentations, and benchmark data that this evolutionary technology would provide the functionality and the performance needed to be able to virtualize 100 percent of the industry’s workloads — a tall order considering Gartner projects approximately 60 percent of server workloads to be virtualized by 2013. Of course, that study came out before vSphere launched.

So how will VMware go after this virtualized goal of 100 percent of server workloads? How will vSphere help? What’s new?

At its core, vSphere is still our old trusted hypervisor friend: VMware ESX, rewritten to run natively on 64-bit processors. And it is designed to work with Intel’s newer, faster Xeon 5500 Nehalem chips, so that it can take advantage of new virtualization extensions and expanded memory access.

Additionally, vSphere 4 can deliver more powerful virtual machines thanks to an increase in the number of supported virtual processors per virtual machine, doubling from four to eight. It also quadruples the amount of memory per virtual machine from 64GB to 256GB. The network is also expanded upon, supporting 2.5 more virtual NICs per virtual machine, from 4 to 10, while increasing the network throughput from 9Gbps to 30Gbps and increasing the maximum recorded IOPS to over 300,000.

VMware vSphere 4 can then aggregate large numbers of virtual machines and large amounts of physical infrastructures into a single logical resource pool to create a cloud scale environment.  It can also pool up to 32 physical servers with as many as 2,048 processor cores, 1,280 virtual machines, 32TB of memory, 16 petabytes of storage, and 8,000 network ports.

Combining all of these enhancement updates, VMware estimates that it can provide 50 percent improved performance for application development workloads and an estimated 30 percent improved performance for Citrix XenApp. Prior to vSphere, Citrix claimed to have the lead with performance gains with XenApp running inside Citrix XenServer. I’m sure we’ll see a benchmark war coming soon enough from both companies around this application stack.

In addition to these performance enhancements, vSphere 4 also introduces the concept of thin provisioning, host profiles, fault tolerance, VMsafe APIs, vShield Zones, Storage VMotion, hot-add devices, and the long-awaited vNetwork Distributed Switch to name but a few.

But the event wasn’t just about vSphere 4 — VMware wanted to get more across than just a new upgrade to VI3. The virtualization giant is clearly looking to the cloud, no longer content with ruling the current virtual datacenter. VMware’s claim to the first cloud operating system isn’t that far off. The company wanted people to walk away with an understanding that vSphere 4 is the first stab toward the realization of cloud computing and the cloud OS. VMware wants to be the bridge between the datacenter, the virtual datacenter, and the cloud. VMware said that vSphere 4 is going to transform the IT infrastructure into a private cloud, a collection of internal clouds that would then be federated on-demand to external clouds.

The question that VMware has to find the answer to is whether or not this “cloud” message was clearly articulated and understood by the virtual admin. Sure, admins are obviously excited about the features and gains within the vSphere 4 platform, but are they as equally excited about the idea behind the cloud? In reality, as long as the admin is excited and upgrades from VI3 to vSphere 4, isn’t that enough in the short term for VMware to become successful with the cloud notion anyway? It certainly gets them closer to the cloud goal, whether the admin cares about it or not, doesn’t it? After all, there are plenty of benefits to upgrading to vSphere 4, cloud aside.