VMware vSphere 4.1 – RELEASED

VMware vSphere 4.1 has been released!

This is a release that many have been waiting for.  Virtualization.info leaked some early details a couple days ago.

Some of the features that are added include:

• Memory Compression – compressing RAM pages rather than using disk swapping, which will improve performance (could significantly help VDI environments)
  
• Storage I/O Control – VM’s with a greater need for disk resources can be given priority.
  
• Network I/O Control – Can better leverage network utilization by setting QoS priorites for each flow type (iSCSI, NFS, etc)
  
• DRS Host Affinity – VM movement can be more granular (great for limiting SQL VM movement, reducing SQL license requirements)
  
• ESXi will have native Active Directory Integration
  
• VMware vCenter Server – Will only run on 64-bit Windows.
• vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) – New protocol to interface between VMware and storage arrays.  This can offload some storage tasks to the storage array natively.

The maximums have become larger

• 3,000 VMs per cluster (increase by 2 times)
• 1,000 hosts per vCenter server (increase by more than 3 times)
• 10,000 VMs per vCenter (increase by more than 3 times)
• Up to 8 vMotions in parallel when using 10GbE

Additionally, some names have changed:

• VMotion is now vMotion
• Storage VMotion is now Storage vMotion
• The free ESXi package will be called vSphere Hypervisor
• ESX & ESXi (paid version) will be discussed as the Hypervisor architectures

Well, I can’t wait to get it installed in the lab and give it a spin. Go to http://www.vmware.com/download to download it too.