VMware Presents vSphere Cloud OS
Heralded as a leap into the new era, vSphere 4.0, which was introduced April 21 as the successor to VMware's Virtual Infrastructure 3.x, is at least a logical step in the right direction upon a more sober assessment: through consolidation and automation based on an infrastructure of virtual components, a solution to satisfy turnkey IT services.
The vSphere product, considered by the company as its "first operating system for building the internal cloud" and whose name was decided by VMware employee vote, extends its previous software basis with a number of interesting features. Performance is now better: eight virtual CPUs instead of four, 256 GBytes of memory instead of 64, network bandwidth increased from 9 Gbits/second to 30, and 300,000 I/O operations per second instead of 100,000.
Even more important are the architectural enhancements that should allow building a virtual mainframe out of software components. Thus a central virtual switch per cluster, which Cisco provides in the form of their Nexus 1000v product, can replace individual VM switches. The virtual network components can be administered separately and distinctly from the virtual servers. Also, shadow copies of an instance of a failed VM can be activated, replacing the usual high-availability solution. An activated instance also spawns copies of itself to avoid any single point of failure.
Particular security measures come into play with vShield Zones that can isolate VMs based on logical trust or organizational boundaries, creating network access rules for individual hosts based on logical zones. A VM secured in this way transfers security policies with host migrations so that protections are not lost.
The coming years should see more management components added that might allow automatic in-servicing of VMs or provide users with a catalog of turnkey solutions. The prices for the new virtualization options start at around $800 and extend to about $3,500 per CPU.
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.