What’s New with VMware vSphere 4
VMware vSphere™ 4 is the industry’s first cloud operating system, transforming your IT infrastructure into a private cloud—a collection of internal clouds federated on-demand to external clouds—delivering IT infrastructure as an easily accessible service. Combining VMware’s industry leading virtualization technology and experience, VMware vSphere delivers greater efficiency with uncompromising control, all while preserving customer choice.
Maximize Application Throughput and Operational Efficiency
Reduce capital and operational costs by maximizing application throughput:
- Get up to 8900 db transactions per second per virtual machine1 and more than 200,000 I/O operations per second per VMware ESX host
- Increase MS SQL Server throughput efficiency by 20% and Citrix XenApp throughput by 30%
- Get three times (3x) the network transmit throughput of VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and gain up to ten times (10x) more iSCSI throughput to storage2
- Manage a record number of MS Exchange mailboxes per host3
Increase operational efficiency as you:
- Simplify and enhance network provisioning, monitoring and administration in VMware vSphere™ environments with vNetwork Distributed Switch and third party switches such as the Cisco Nexus 1000v
- Maximize storage with vStorage Thin Provisioning
- Save power by automatically consolidating virtual machines and powering off unused servers during periods of low usage with Distributed Power Management
Increase Control through Service Level Automation
Increase control over application availability levels and meet your service level agreements.
- Deliver zero downtime, zero data loss continuous availability to any application through VMware Fault Tolerance
- Protect yourself from data outages with built-in, cost effective backup and recovery of any application with VMware Data Recovery
- Increase scalability of virtual machines with up to 8 virtual CPUs, 255GB of RAM, 21 virtual storage and network devices and up to 120TB of virtual disks, as needed, without disruption with hot add of virtual CPU and virtual memory, hot plug of virtual storage and network devices, and hot extend of virtual disks
- Enforce compliance to application level security policies across large pools of servers and virtual machines with VMware vShield Zones
- Enforce compliance to standard physical server configurations with Host Profiles which allow a designated “golden” server configuration profile to be applied to many physical ESX hosts
- Control multiple vSphere datacenters from a single pane of glass with VMware vCenter Server 4 linked mode
- Automate repetitive day to day tasks and execute routine maintenance activities at the push of a button in virtual environments with workflow automation provided by VMware vCenter Orchestrator, a component of vCenter Server
Empower IT Departments with Choice
Let users select from a broad range of applications, operating systems or industry standard hardware supported by VMware vSphere to deliver services rapidly.
- Ensure delivery consistent application service levels regardless of choice of OS, application, hardware or even location with vApps on VMware vSphere
- Move new and existing applications between internal clouds or to vSphere-based external clouds while retaining service levels with vApp
- Increase your choice of end to end physical and virtual enterprise management frameworks, backup solutions and vCloud service providers with VMware Ready optimized solutions
1 VMware Sets Virtualization Performance Records for Database and Web Workloads
2 vSphere 4.0 supports 10 GigE with iSCSI
3 VMware Sets Capacity Record Running Microsoft Exchange on IBM System x3850 M2 Servers

