Oct 11, 2009
VMware vSphere 4 What’s New
This virtualization blog will highlight the new features that VMware vSphere 4 provides.
- Infrastructure Administration
Alarms and events: there are now two type of triggers (any, all) . Conditions are now based on time thresholds (condition length – 0 sec to 60 min) to reduce false triggers.
Host profiles : is a portable set of policies to manage configuration consistency and correctness. a profile can be created and attached on ESX host. config settings can be exported from a reference host (golden host). Compliance is used to compare the associated hosts with the profile. The policy editor is a form which provides options for each of the policies.
VMDirectPath I/O : a virtual machine guest can access device driver directly. This functionality requires virtual machines to be running on host with Intel Nahalem CPUs.
Hot-add : now we can add and remove devices (nics, memory, cpu, disk) while virtual machines are powered on. But this feature depends on the Operating System (OS) the virtual machine is running on. If the OS doesn’t support it then you won’t see the options to enable/disable this. Memory hot-add is currently only supported on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and above, and Windows Server 2008. Virtual CPU hot-add is currently only supported in Windows Server 2008 datacenter. This feature is disabled by default and will need to be enabled in order to work.
vApp : is a multi-tier application service, similar to a resource pool as you can allocate resources.
Thin and thick disk provisioning : allocate and commit space on demand (grows over time). You can now convert thin-disks to thick-think using ‘inflate’ whilst virtual machines are powered on. Thick-disks can also be converted to thin-disks using VMware Storage VMotion.
New virtual machine creation now gives option to support fault tolerance.
- Network Management
- Storage Management
- Resource Management
- Business Continuity