OK, SRM and View 4 are out. Go ahead and start planning those upgrades from 3.x to 4. I mean really, vSphere is out now for almost 6 months. Get Enterprise Plus or the Acceleration kit, just get to vSphere. Here are a few of my reason’s why.
1. Round Robin Storage IO. Those without can giant Fiber Channel SAN infrastructure can start to stack the Software iSCSI ports and get performance above and beyond what was possible before with iSCSI. Equalogic, Lefthand and other iSCSI SAN manufacturers have to be throwing huge parties about this. While talking about iSCSI you don’t need a Service Console just for every iSCSI VMkernel port. This always seemed like extra setup in 3.x.
2 Thin Provisioning, I am not technical enough with storage to know if SAN based thin provisioning is better for some reason. It is great to be able to save space with template and other large footprint VM’s.
3. dVSwitch, VMsafe and vShield zones. New hooks for security will eventually give us insight into areas of the VI we could not see before. VMsafe will let vendors tie into the kernel (at least that is how I understand it). Additionally the new dVSwitch (Distributed Virtual Switch, sometimes it is called something else) will give control and sight into the network stack in ways that was impossible before.
This is stuff many may have read on the release date in May, but now that I have seen vSphere in action and some of the biggest hurdles (SRM and View) have been overcome, it is now time to upgrade, already.