VMware vSphere 4 Delivers First Cloud Computing OS

VMware today announced its VMware vSphere 4 product to customers as a way to delivery IT infrastructure in an easy, reliable, and efficient way via both the internal and external cloud. vSphere4 enables customers to bring cloud computing to their IT infrastructure which allows for reducing operating costs and helps to increase control over infrastructure.

"With VMware vSphere 4, we are once again raising the bar significantly for businesses that desire to dramatically improve IT performance," said Raghu Raghuram, vice president and general manager, server business unit, VMware. "The cost savings associated with virtualization are undeniable, and as more customers standardize on VMware to drive 100 percent virtualization, they are realizing the additional benefits that our solutions deliver, including increased flexibility and agility."

What Is vSphere 4?
VMware has created products such as vSphere that can turn your data center into one big resource pool to choose from. Instead of ordering hardware, installing hardware, configuring hardware, and so fourth - you can simply deploy a virtual machine in a few seconds with resources from your pool that's already out there and always available. vSphere is built on the VMware Infrastructure (ESX 3.5) and is essentially an upgrade of that but now, instead of only being able to manage the 'internal' resource pools or cloud, you can also manage the external cloud too.

VMware is marketing vSphere 4 as the first cloud operating system (OS), and rightfully so - that's exactly what it is. With vSphere 4 you can easily migrate your virtual machines from your internal datacenter to the cloud using vMotion.

How do I use vCloud
vCloud is a tool of vSphere4 that enables you to manage your infrastructure in the cloud and even deploy application on demand by selecting from the thousands of apps in the marketplace. To get started with hosting your infrastructure in the cloud, you will need to sign up for one of the VMware vCloud Service Providers as found on Vmware.com. Whether you deploy your production or test/dev applications to a VMware vCloud partner, you can be assured that the application will work in the cloud as it did on-premise, and will remain portable between your datacenter and other vCloud Service Providers. Most of the vCloud Service Providers are offering free trials so that you can give them a trial run before deciding on one to go with.

"VMware vSphere 4 is the core of our cloud computing initiative because it gives us the cost savings and scalability benefits of cloud computing, with the choice to deploy any application or OS without getting locked into any particular architecture," said Christopher Rence, CIO, FICO.

vSphere 4 Pricing Information
VMware vSphere 4 prices start at $166 per processor for all in one virtualization solutions for small businesses and go up to VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus priced at $3,495 per processor delivering features to transform the datacenter into an internal private cloud. Additional pricing information can be found at VMware.com