VMware released the long awaited vSphere 4.1. This update of the current vSphere productline has some great new feature included in this release. The notes on “What’s new” can be found here.
Some new features include :
Network I/O Control. Traffic-management controls allow flexible partitioning of physical NIC bandwidth between different traffic types, including virtual machine, vMotion, FT, and IP storage traffic (vNetwork Distributed Switch only).
Memory Compression. Compressed memory is a new level of the memory hierarchy, between RAM and disk. Slower than memory, but much faster than disk, compressed memory improves the performance of virtual machines when memory is under contention, because less virtual memory is swapped to disk.
Storage I/O Control. This feature provides quality-of-service capabilities for storage I/O in the form of I/O shares and limits that are enforced across all virtual machines accessing a datastore, regardless of which host they are running on. Using Storage I/O Control, vSphere administrators can ensure that the most important virtual machines get adequate I/O resources even in times of congestion.
Network I/O Control. Traffic-management controls allow flexible partitioning of physical NIC bandwidth between different traffic types, including virtual machine, vMotion, FT, and IP storage traffic (vNetwork Distributed Switch only).
ESX/ESXi Active Directory Integration. Integration with Microsoft Active Directory allows seamless user authentication for ESX/ESXi. You can maintain users and groups in Active Directory for centralized user management and you can assign privileges to users or groups on ESX/ESXi hosts. In vSphere 4.1, integration with Active Directory allows you to roll out permission rules to hosts by using Host Profiles.
Also a nice note is included under Install and Deployment : “Future major releases of VMware vSphere will include only the VMware ESXi architecture.” This means that we won’t see ESX anymore in the future releases. The result will be that you eventually will need to upgrade to ESXi. Not a bad thing as I already explained in an earlier post here. For more information on how to migrate to ESXi, look at this whitepaper written by VMware.
You can download the new release here. Next thing : update to new release and play with new features 😉
UPDATE : For more information on the vSphere 4.1 go to this link page of Eric Siebert. Excellent resource for all the vSphere 4.1 information out there.