Operating system for building the internal cloud

VMware announced VMware vSphere 4, the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud, enabling the delivery of IT as a service.

With VMware vSphere 4, customers can achieve cloud computing within their own IT environments. With these internal clouds, IT departments can simplify how computing is delivered in order to help decrease its cost and increase its flexibility.

VMware vSphere 4 will aggregate and holistically manage large pools of infrastructure – processors, storage and networking – as a seamless, flexible and dynamic operating environment. For enterprises, VMware vSphere 4 will bring the power of cloud computing to the datacenter, slashing IT costs while dramatically increasing IT responsiveness. 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 datacenters and/or cloud providers.

Efficiency:

• About 30 percent increase in consolidation ratios
• Up to 50 percent storage savings with VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning
• Up to 20 percent additional power and cooling savings with VMware Distributed Power Management which uses VMware VMotion to automatically place all virtual machines on as few physical servers as possible without compromising service levels, and power down physical servers that are not needed.

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.

It 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.

With VMware vSphere 4, customers retain flexibility of choice, remaining independent of hardware, OS, application stack, and service providers. VMware vSphere 4 Pricing Starts at $166 per processor.