VMware vSphere 4.1 Adds More Grunt!

Posted on 16 Jul 2010 by Ray Heffer

Earlier this week VMware released vSphere 4.1, a significant new version of the industry leading vSphere 4 virtualisation hypervisor. What is interesting is that from September 2010, vCenter management products will be licensed on a per VM basis. This includes: Chargeback, Site Recovery Manager, AppSpeed and CapacityIQ which are currently priced per processor. Products that won’t be included in this licensing change are: vCenter Lab Manager, vCenter Lifecycle Manager, vCenter Server Heartbeat, vCenter Server, and VMware vSphere (ESX).

The new licensing model will be sold in packs, with a minimum of a 25 VM pack. VMware vCenter will remain as a per server license.

As virtualization becomes more pervasive, the VM has become the unit of measure for the data center in terms of cost accounting, said Bogomil Balkansky, VMware’s Vice President of Product Marketing.

New pricing has also been announced as part of vSphere 4.1, which offers stacks of new features for enterprise users, and importantly allows VMware to offer some of its more dated innovations at SMB prices. vMotion for example is now included in Standard and Essentials Plus vSphere editions, although the price has increased. Customers that have purchased support for the Standard Edition of vSphere 4.0 will be able to use vMotion at no extra cost.

For the enterprise customer, vSphere 4.1 has a new I/O control for both storage and networking. With this QoS (Quality of Service) style prioritisation for virtual machines, we can now guarantee storage and network IOPS for a virtual machine. Previously all virtual machines on the same ESX server had the same level of access to storage and network traffic, and there was no option to prioritse this. QoS metrics now move with the virtual machine when vMotion is active.

The vSphere 4.1 product is available as a free upgrade for those users buying support for vSphere 4.0 and will be available as a download as of today.

Update

If you are already using VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4 in your vSphere environment, and you plan to upgrade to vSphere 4.1 then you must upgrade to VMware Lab Manager 4.0.2.