Today VMware announced the long awaited general availability of vSphere 4.0!  But if your thinking about going bleeding edge err leading edge (which ever you like to think of it as), you might think again.

Although vSphere 4.0 offers many new and exciting enhancements (see our VMware vSphere 4.0 Set to Launch news blast), not only are some of the features not yet available, but upgrading an existing environment could disable some of the functionality currently in use in your 3.x environment.  We put together the following software compatibility matrix to help you determine if an upgrade to vSphere 4.0 is right for you.

** vCenter Server Heartbeat 5.5 becomes compatible with vCenter Server 4.0 with the release of Heartbeat 5.5 U1.
*** VMware Consolidated Backup 1.5 becomes compatible with vSphere 4.0 with the release of VCB 1.5 U1.
**** VMware View Manager and VMware View Composer are compatible with ESXi U3 and later.

As you can see, users of the management and desktop products should hold off until the second half of 2009.  Core virtualization features appear to be compatiable from 3.5 to 4.0 however you should test any upgrades rigorously in a dev region before promoting to production.  Best of luck on your upgrade to vSphere!

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