For anyone who is not familiar with vSphere its basically VMware's upgrade to VI3 (Virtual Infrastructure 3.)  Currently, VMware has the release date scheduled for Q2 of 2009 with some documentation on their site indicating it will be available to the general public on or around May 21st 2009.   VMware is usually very good about sticking to their announced release dates, although some of new features in VI4 wont be available until later in Q3 of 2009.

We are still working through our partner channel to get our hands on a beta copy, but from what we have seen thus far, VI4 aka vSphere looks quite impressive. VMware had added some very interesting new features including:

• Host Profiles
• vNetwork Distributed Switches
• Integrated Storage VMotion
• Fault Tolerance (FT)
• Thin Provisioning
• vCenter Server 4 linked mode

We should have some screen shots up in a few days of the new interface so stay tuned!

Host Profiles

Host profiles allow an ESX administrator the ability to create a "baseline" or profile of a ESX host and apply that profile to a cluster.  This lets the ESX administrator configure things like iSCSI, NTP, DNS etc. once and have these settings propagate to new members of the ESX cluster.

A real world use case for host profiles would come into place during a ESX host failure.  Traditionally, if you had a failure, you would have to rebuild and reconfigure a new ESX host before joining it to your cluster.  With host profiles, if you have a ESX host fail, you can simply spin up a new ESX host and join it to your cluster and it will inherit any of the settings you have pre-defined in the profile.  This is a very nice feature to help you quickly recover from a ESX host failure.

vNetwork Distributed Switches

The vNetwork Distributed Switches feature extends the current implementation of vSwitches to the cluster.  In VI3, vSwitches must be added to each node/host in a cluster.  The settings on the vSwitches must match right down to the configurations of the port groups to ensure services like DRS, HA and VMotion funtion properly.

However with vNetwork Distributed Switches, ESX administrators can now configure a vSwitch at the cluster level and have it automatically configured on each member ESX host of the cluster.  They also added a feature to allow migration / upgrade of legacy vSwitches to the new dynamic vNetwork Distributed Switches to save you the time and expense of having to upgrade the older non distributed switches - way to go VMware!

Integrated Storage VMotion

The integrated storage VMotion is probably old news for some of you, but I'll mention it anyways.  Prior to VI4, storage VMotion was done through the CLI (command line interface.)  There were a couple non-VMware certified plugins that would extend Virtual Centers interface to allow SVMotion through the Virtual Infrasture Client (VI client) GUI but they were "use at your own risk" - which for most enterprise customers was not acceptable.

In VI4, SVMotion is now integrated into the VI client so you can now SVMotion VM's to any iSCSI, NFS or fibre arrays with a simple click of the button!

Fault Tolerance

Fault Tolerance (FT) is an amazing new feature that extends the existing functionality of High Availability (HA.)  FT basically makes a cloned copy of a given VM and keeps it in lockstep with its parent VM.  Should the parent VM (running on a different ESX host) crash due to an issue on the ESX host itself, the cloned VM (running from another ESX host) will continue to function without skipping a beat.

The IP address, MAC running applications everything are an exact replica of the parent running on the other ESX host.  So the moment the primary ESX host crashes (taking with it the parent VM) the cloned FT VM immediately begins functioning as the primary ensuring zero downtime to mission critical systems and applications - wow!

Thin Provisioning

Your storage admins are going to love this new feature.  Thin provisioning keeps the size of the VMDK files limited to the size of the actual data used within the VM!  In VI3, if you created a new VM with a 20GB hard drive, the VMDK file represented by the VM would occupy 20GB of storage on the SAN regardless of how much disk was used within the VM.  So if your VM only used 10GB of virtual disk space, you would have 10GB of wasted space on your SAN.  Thin provisioned virtual disks eliminate this keeping the size of your virtual disks limited to the actual size of the utilization within the virtual machine.

vCenter Server 4 Linked Mode

The new 4 linked mode allows the VI client to manage multiple vCenter instances all from within a single view.  This is great addition for anyone with multiple vCenter instances such as in a DR or remote site.

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