VMware vSphere 4.1 editions and feature changes

With the release of VMware vSphere 4.1, VMware has made some changes in the product features of each vSphere editions. The most noticeable changes are:

• vMotion is now included in the vSphere Standard and vSphere Essentials Plus edition
• vStorage APIs for Multipathing is now included in the vSphere Enterprise edition

The inclusion of vMotion to vSphere Standard and vSphere Essentials Plus edition will further improve the competitive position of VMware to other hypervisors. The following new features have been added:

• The Storage I/O Control feature has been added to the vSphere Enterprise Plus edition
• The Network I/O Control feature has been added to the vSphere Enterprise Plus edition
• vStorage APIs for Array Integration has been added to the vSphere Enterprise and vSphere Enterprise Plus editions

The following table compares vSphere Editions for Mid-size and Enterprise Businesses.

Announcement: VMware vSphere 4.1

Today VMware announced the successor to the vSphere platform in the form of VMware vSphere 4.1. 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 virtualize 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.

You can download VMware vSphere 4.1 here.