Today I, and two other colleagues, attended the vSphere 4 prodcut launch in Houten the Netherlands. The subject was Efficiency, control and Choice just as in the webcast from yesterday evening.

Jeremy presented the overall vSphere product and after a short break Ton Hermes presented the Technical track and Stef Koopman presented the Sales track. I attended the Technical track and Edwin and Alex attended the Sales track.

The information presented was not very new to us and probably not to you either as we posted an article on the news and new features yesterday.

The news were the features in the four versions of vSphere …….

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This morning a message from John Troyer popped up on my TwitterFox telling me that on April 20th VMware  announced the general availability of their new flagship product, VMware vSphere 4. Finally after all our time beta testing and filling out reviews vSphere is coming!

PALO ALTO, CA, April 21, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced VMware vSphere™ 4, the industry’s first operating system for building the internal cloud, enabling the delivery of efficient, flexible and reliable IT as a service. With a wide range of groundbreaking new capabilities, VMware vSphere 4 brings cloud computing to enterprises in an evolutionary, non-disruptive way – delivering uncompromising control with greater efficiency while preserving customer choice.

As the complexity of IT environments has continued to increase over time, customers’ share of IT budgets are increasingly spent on simply trying to “keep the lights on.” With the promise of cloud computing, customers are eager to achieve the benefits, but struggle to see the path to getting there.  Leveraging VMware vSphere 4, customers can take pragmatic steps to achieve cloud computing within their own IT environments.  With these “internal” clouds, IT departments can dramatically simplify how computing is delivered in order to help decrease its cost and increase its flexibility, enabling IT to respond more rapidly to changing business requirements.

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After many complaints from the community VMware finally gave in and renamed their next generation ESX, formerly known as vSphere, to vCloudOS. We at VMGuru.nl already complained at the end of 2008 about the new name and many other did the same. Some even claimed that VMware couldn’t have registered the name vSphere as it was owned by another company.

Despite the fact that VMware publically used vSphere as their new name for their virtual infrastructure at VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes they now changed it.

According to VMware´s spokesman Faril Polos, ´The new name better reflects the role, the opportunities and VMware’s strategy for our line of Virtual Datacenter products.’

For more information visit the VMware website or look here.

VMware uses the name vSphere for their Virtualisation Infrastructure product also known as ESX. Here in Cannes in the hands on labs I have used the new interface and some of its nifty features. You have to get used to the new interface, but when you are used to it it works nicely and you can find your way around quickly. Did you have to search for some deep hidden options in the VI3 suite, here with the new look and feel around vSphere its almost effortless.

Yesterday I tried out the VMware vCenter Data Recovery Appliance in a hands on lab. It’s a disk-based backup and recovery solution that enables quick, simple and complete data protection for virtual machines. I didn’t have to load an agent on the virtual machines since vCenter Data Recovery has no knowledge of the guest operating system itself. After selecting a LUN as a destination for the backups, I marked some running virtual machines to be back upped.

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Today we did our first Hands-on-Lab. Last year these labs were fully booked so we decided to hit the lab early this year.

This lab was based around the Cisco Nexus 1000v virtual switch, which brings back network administration to network administrators.

Erik did the Cisco Nexus 1000v lab today. Since we didn’t receive any beta material yet this is our first real experience with the new virtual switch by Cisco.The switch is based on NX-OS so network administrators can use it just like they configure their other switches.

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Several blogs have already reported on this issue, the new version of VMware’s ESX product line will not be called VI4 or ESX(i)4 but VMware vSphere. When I read this I thought which idiot came up with that name? vSphere? What’s that? What is the link with ESX and virtualization? Are we going to run virtual machines in spheres in the future because the term ‘isolation’ was not clear enough? Does VMware need to join the buzzword-hype, like ‘bubble’ and ‘cloud’?

Apparently VMware employees where able to vote for a name for the new product and vSphere was the winner in this competition.
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