Operating system to build cloud

VMware has introduced VMware vSphere 4, an operating system for building the internal cloud. The architectural enhancements enable business-critical, transaction-heavy applications, such as SAP and Exchange, together with their SQL and Oracle databases, to be run on a 100% virtualised internal cloud powered by VMware vSphere 4.

The company claims record performance results with VMware vSphere 4 including: performance throughput record of 8900 database transactions per second, as demonstrated on Oracle database with an OLTP workload modelled after TPC-C; record low overhead compared to native; record IO throughput; 2x increase in the maximum recorded I/O operations per second triples the maximum recorded I/O operations per second to more than 300,000; improved virtual machine networking and support for NetQueue that shows up to 100% improvement in network throughput; and fully saturating hardware bus limits of 30 Gbps.

VMware vSphere 4 also introduces new scalability capabilities. By expanding server resource support to 1 TB of RAM and 64 logical processing cores, some of the largest and most powerful servers can be leveraged for virtual workloads. With support for up to 256 GB of RAM and eight virtual CPUs per virtual machine, nearly 100% of resource-intensive workloads such as high-end databases are suitable for virtualisation.