VMware to spill the vSphere beans on April 21

Des news sur l'annonce VMWare du 21 avril prochain....

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1352538,00.html?track=NL-916&ad=697271&asrc=EM_NLN_6485697&uid=8243575#

Mark your calendars. VMware will launch the next generation of its virtualization platform on April 21, at an event at its Palo Alto headquarters, flanked by partners Cisco and Intel.

With the launch, VMware users and partners are hopeful that the company will put an end to months of speculation and hyperbole about everything from what the product is, what it means, even what to call it. Will it be vSphere? VMware Infrastructure (VI4)? ESX 4?

VMware's upcoming version
Over the past few months, VMware has provided details on its next-generation platform. At VMworld Europe in February, VMware presenters showcased many upcoming products and features. And given the trickle of blog posts about the upcoming version, the company has apparently tacitly lifted the NDA under which many bloggers operated.

So here are some things we know. The hypervisor itself will be 64-bit, will provide support for up to 256 GB of RAM per guest and eight-way virtual symmetric multiprocessing, or SMP. On the management side, it will be possible to cluster the vCenter servers, and users will be able to create and provision virtual machines using new host profiles and guest templates.

On the storage side, vSphere will feature a new pluggable storage architecture that allows the environment to directly leverage storage arrays' native features, and integrate storage management directly into the vCenter client. vCenter will also provide better visibility into storage consumption, will support thin-provisioned disks, and include a graphical user interface for Storage VMotion.

Another big area of improvement will be networking, thanks to the new distributed virtual switch, and Cisco's proprietary Nexus 1000V implementation thereof. With a distributed virtual switch, administrators can set up host and VM networks once rather than having to set them up on each host in a cluster.

In addition to core ESX and vCenter products, VMware is also expected to launch several new ancillary products, including the long-awaited VMware Fault Tolerance, and AppSpeed for performance management of applications running within a virtual machine. VMware is also expected to enable the VMsafe application programming interfaces that will let security vendors knit their products more tightly with ESX.

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