What’s New in VMware vSphere 4.1?

More than 170,000 customers around the world - from startups and small businesses to Fortune 100 enterprises - rely on vSphere to reduce costs, increase efficiency, streamline IT operations, and deliver IT as a service.

For small and midsize businesses, the new vSphere 4.1 delivers higher efficiency, greater agility and more freedom of choice than ever before, making it easier than ever to optimise existing assets and get always-on IT with comprehensive, cost-effective backup and recovery, resulting in a solution that can help customers achieve rapid, sustainable growth.

Efficiency through Utilisation and Automation

vSphere 4.1 enables higher consolidation ratios with unequalled performance by providing ground-breaking new memory management technology and by expanding its storage, networking and automation capabilities.

• Memory compression - Improve application performance by up to 30 per cent by reducing memory contention
• Performance reporting - Deliver key storage performance statistics, regardless of storage protocol
• IPv6 and E1000 vNIC - Protect and expand your network with support for Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) and jumbo frames
• Easy installation with VMware Go - Simplify and accelerate VMware ESXi deployments with scripted installation to local and remote disks

Agility with Control

vSphere 4.1 extends its award-winning availability and security capabilities with the world's fastest live migrations and the ability to respond in parallel to any business need or change. Application services enhancements deliver new status details for high availability, tighter integration with an existing directory services and advanced patching.

• VMware vMotion - Speed and scale enhancements to vMotion deliver superior platform response and availability by migrating virtual machines up to five times faster and enabling up to eight vMotion events in parallel
• VMware High Availability - Deeper diagnostic and health checks further enhance application availability in virtual machines, with full support for clustered virtual machines utilising Windows Failover Clustering/Microsoft Cluster Service
• VMware Data Recovery - Scale enhancements to protect even more virtual machines, while new support for VSS delivers application-consistent backup and restore for applications in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2
• Active Directory integration - Seamless user authentication for VMware ESX or ESXi hosts (rather than VMware vCenter Server) for centralised user management easily assign privileges to users or groups and roll out permission rules across hosts
• VMware vCenter Update Manager - New functionality for deployment of third-party patches, pre-flight checklists and advanced handling of recalled patches.

Freedom of Choice

vSphere 4.1 empowers small and midsize organisations with unprecedented freedom of choice, not only in terms of increased hardware and software support, but also by opening new opportunities to leverage cloud computing.

• Expanded vSphere HCL - the vSphere 4.1 hardware compatibility list (HCL) expands the platform to support more operating. systems, devices, applications and service providers than any other virtualisation platform and includes support for third-party serial port concentrators (for enhanced management), as well as the latest multicore x86 processors.
• vCloud Express - SMBs that adopt vSphere can also leverage the benefits of VMware vCloud Express, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering delivered by leading VMware service provider partners that provides reliable, on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure that is 100 percent compatible with internal vSphere environments and with VMware Virtualised services.
  

find out more

For more information, contact your Phoenix Account Manager on 0845 265 1265 or email info@phoenixs.co.uk