December 20, 2008 8:42 AM PST
VMWare VI4 renamed to vSphere
For those interested in where VMWare's Virtual Infrastructure is heading, there was interesting news out of a Minneapolis VMWare User Group (VMUG) meeting yesterday: apparently VMWare is making it official that VI4 is now vSphere.
From Jason Boche's blog:
Today at the Minneapolis VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting, VMware employees disclosed to a group of 150+ attendees the new name for the next generation of Virtual Infrastructure many have been referring to as VI4 or VI.next. The new name is VMware vSphere. I value and respect the various relationships I have with VMware and thus before posting this news, I checked with authoritative sources inside VMware. VMware Marketing has endorsed the release of this information to the public. VMware also released a few new configuration maximum details on vSphere but for now I am keeping that information to myself. Other audience members in attendance may decide to break this news.
Why does this matter to cloud computing fans, you ask?
VMWare's vCloud vision depends greatly on the upcoming features that expand the scale in which VMWare's core products can operate; expanding beyond the server to the data center as a whole and beyond. Rumors of features such as over-WAN migration of virtual machines in VI4 are key to the vision of federated VMWare-based clouds becoming a reality. So, create a Google Alert for vSphere, sit back and watch the show.
James Urquhart is a seasoned field technologist with almost 20 years of experience in distributed systems development and deployment, focusing on service-oriented architectures, cloud computing, and virtualization. James is currently market manager for the Data Center 3.0 strategy at Cisco Systems, though the opinions expressed here are strictly his own. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
