Enhanced Platform Delivers Performance, Efficiency at Scale for Public and Private Cloud Infrastructures.

VMware  announced VMware vSphere 4.1, the latest version of the award-winning VMware virtualization platform, as well as an expanded portfolio of virtualization management solutions. VMware once again sets the bar in virtualization, coupling dramatic scalability and performance enhancements with new management capabilities to deliver the most powerful foundation for cloud computing.

“Strategically, server virtualization is an IT modernization catalyst that will change how IT is acquired, consumed, managed, sourced and paid for. Virtualization will even change how businesses innovate and grow,” said Thomas Bittman, VP Distinguished Analyst at Gartner. “Done well, server virtualization makes fundamental changes that can lead an organization down the path of private and public cloud computing.”

Cloud computing represents a new model for the way IT services are developed, provisioned and consumed.  VMware virtualization enables enterprises and service providers to lay the foundation for cloud computing by aggregating an elastic pool of computing resources that can be accessed on-demand while enabling policy-based automation and management to increase efficiency.   VMware vSphere 4.1 and the VMware vCenter™ product family are cornerstone solutions for customers and service providers building private and public cloud environments. As such, these technologies have attracted a broad partner ecosystem of industry leaders that support and extend this foundation. Read more about partner ecosystem support for VMware vSphere 4.1.

“Virtualization occupies an increasingly central position within IT strategy as the cornerstone of modern infrastructures and the foundation for cloud computing,” said Raghu Raghuram, senior vice president and general manager, virtualization and cloud platforms, VMware. “As the market leader, VMware vSphere™ is redefining the economics of computing, while helping customers to achieve the levels of utilization and automation that underpin the promise of cloud computing.”

With groundbreaking new memory management and expanded resource pooling capabilities, VMware vSphere 4.1 promises to accelerate the evolution of datacenters and service providers into cloud computing environments, setting the standard for key tenets of cloud computing:

• 2X larger resource pools with 3X the management power. Already the most powerful virtualization platform on the market, VMware vSphere 4.1 includes dramatic scalability enhancements, enabling customers to aggregate twice the computing resources within a single pool. VMware vCenter Server can now manage up to 10,000 concurrently powered on VMs – three times as many as before.
• Up to 25% better performance and reduced cost per application. With the addition of new memory compression technology, VMware vSphere 4.1 preserves the performance of systems under heavy load, resulting in up to 25% better performance over previous approaches. Memory compression also contributes to further increased consolidation ratios in VMware vSphere. Already the highest consolidation levels in the market, this increase reduces customers’ cost-per-application, a critical measure of value delivered through virtualization.
• 5X faster virtual machine migrations for increased agility. Speed and scale enhancements to VMware vMotion™ deliver superior platform response and availability by migrating virtual machines up to five times faster and enabling up to eight concurrent vMotion events per server pair.
• New network and storage I/O controls deliver Quality of Service guarantees. VMware vSphere 4.1 introduces new controls that allow better alignment of storage and network I/O resources to business priority. VMware vSphere network and storage I/O controls provide granular control over how applications access shared storage and network resources. Administrators can set quality of service priorities per virtual machine and VMware vSphere 4.1 automatically manages resource allocation accordingly.
• Increased performance through open integration with storage environments. VMware vSphere 4.1 already supports more operating systems, devices, applications, and service providers than any other virtualization solution. With the introduction of new VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), VMware vSphere 4.1 enables tighter integration with solutions from VMware’s storage partners to increase the efficiency and performance of the platform in cloud environments.