VMware vSphere is the industry’s most complete virtualisation platform and the best platform for building cloud infrastructures. vSphere transforms datacenters into dramatically simplified cloud infrastructures, enabling the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services. View presentation »

New features 4.1

Storage I/O Control - set storage quality of service priorities per virtual machine
Storage Performance Reporting - for improved tuning and performance troubleshooting
vStorage APIs for Array Integration - offload tasks to storage arrays to improve performance
vStorage APIs for Data Protection - now supports VSS quiescing on Windows 2008/2008 R2
Network I/O Control - set network quality of service priorities per flow type (iSCSI, NFS, ...)
Memory Compression - enhance memory overcommit and reclaim application performance
DRS Host Affinity - restrict placement of virtual machines to a subset of hosts in a cluster
Virtual Serial Port Concentrator - access virtual machine serial ports over the network
HA enhancements - Healthcheck status, Operational Status and optimised interaction with DRS
FT enhancements - DRS interoperability, versioning-control and improved logging performance
Improved performance - for NFS, vMotion, Storage vMotion, virtual desktops and vCenter
Cloud scalability - more virtual machines and hosts per vCenter Server than ever before

New features 4.0

Host Profiles - standardises settings across multiple ESX hosts
Linked Mode - provides visibility across multiple vCenter Server instances
VM counters in Perfmon - provides accurate guest performance analysis
Orchestrator - automates vSphere tasks using a powerful workflow engine
Fault Tolerance - provides continuous availability to any application
Storage VMotion - now with reduced resource consumption and vCenter management
Data Recovery - provides agentless backup and recovery of virtual machines
HA Maintenance Mode - suspends failover actions during maintenance operations
vShield Zones - enforces network security policies across virtual machine zones
VMsafe - enables security products to work within the ESX host rather than guest OS
Hot Add - supports adding CPUs/memory and adding/removing PCI devices
Virtual machine scalability - supports 8-way virtual SMP and 255GB RAM
ESX host scalability - supports 1TB RAM, 64 CPU cores, 320 VMs and 512 virtual CPUs
64-bit VMkernel and Service Console - provides greater scalability and performance
Distributed Power Management - puts hosts in standby to reduce power consumption
Virtual Disk Thin Provisioning - enables VMs to utilise storage on an as-needed basis
Paravirtualised SCSI adapter - offers greater I/O throughput and lower CPU utilisation
VMFS and disk resizing - grows a VMFS volume and extends a virtual machine disk
Distributed Switch - spans many ESX hosts significantly reducing ongoing maintenance
Private VLANs - restricts communication between VMs on the same network segment
Network VMotion - enables tracking of the networking state of a VM as it moves
Additional Guest operating systems - supports DOS, Windows 3.1, 95 and 98
3rd Party Distributed Switch - supports the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch
Pluggable Storage Architecture - supports EMC PowerPath multipathing software

Features and editions

vSphere platform (one instance of vCenter required for most features)

Standard
ESXi/ESX with 4-way SMP, 256GB RAM per host and up to 6 cores per processor
vCenter Agent, Update Manager and vStorage APIs for Data Protection
vMotion and High Availability

Advanced* - Adds Virtual Serial Port Concentrator, Fault Tolerance, Hot Add, Data Recovery and vShield Zones

Enterprise - Adds vStorage APIs for Array Integration, vStorage APIs for Multipathing, Storage vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Distributed Power Management (DPM)

Enterprise Plus* - Adds Storage I/O Control, Network I/O Control, Distributed Switch, Host Profiles, 8-way SMP and unlimited host memory support

* Supports up to 12 cores per processor

vCenter Server

Standard - Provides large scale management of vSphere deployments
Foundation - Manages only three hosts and does not include Linked Mode and Orchestrator
Heartbeat - Fails over to a standby vCenter Server in the event of a loss of service

Essentials packages (cannot be combined with other vSphere editions)

Essentials
Licenses for 3 physical servers (up to 2 processors each) and vCenter Server for Essentials
ESXi/ESX with 4-way SMP, 256GB RAM per host and up to 6 cores per processor
vCenter Agent, Update Manager and vStorage APIs for Data Protection

Essentials Plus - Adds vMotion, High Availability and Data Recovery