vSphere Released

vSphere, in case you didn't get the memo, is now in general availability. That makes it a pretty big day for the virtualization community.

vSphere, formerly known as VMware Infrastructure, is exciting from a technology viewpoint. One thing that many techies are looking into are the claims of incredible I/O. Scott Lowe is reporting that EMC (VMware's parent company) and VMware are seeing "350,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS)." Those are mind-boggling numbers, even in a specially-tuned environment. Of course, your mileage will likely be much lower than that, but it does show us what's possible, and that the goal of a 100 percent virtualized environment isn't that far off (and, in fact, may be here now).

New pricing will also make it more affordable for non-enterprise shops. The question is whether an environment will shell out for vSphere when it can get more functionality from Hyper-V and XenServer for free.

Will vSphere speed the creation of cloud computing? That's another question for wiser minds than mine. Right now, cloud computing has all the buzz, but very little practical implementation. It could be because good solutions don't exist, or the need for it isn't as great as some would have you believe.

In any event, vSphere is here. Please let me know what you think of it.

Posted by Keith Ward on 05/21/2009 at 12:48 PM