I don’t think this book needs more attention, being sold out on the first day of VMworld, but I’ll do it anyway. Scott Lowe did a great job writing Mastering VMware vSphere 4. Especially if you’re new to VMware vSphere and you want step-by-step instructions on how to install and maintain your VMware vSphere internal cloud (virtual infrastructure). Read the rest of this entry »

When you look at all marketing material of VMware vSphere, you can get confused about what feature is in what version. For example: I was under the impression that 8-way Virtual SMP was a new feature of vSphere regardless of what version you have (Standard, Advanced, Enterprise or Enterprise Plus). Take a look at this press-release for example:

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 very 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 percent of resource-intensive workloads such as high-end databases are suitable for virtualization.

When you look at the pricing sheet, there is no reason to believe that  8-way Virtual SMP is not in all versions of vSphere 4. Read the rest of this entry »