As promised, here are my notes from the vSphere launch and some of my thoughts mixed in for good measure.

The launch opened with quite an impressive marketing video, the video described vSphere as "a revolutionary step and an evolutionary approach" with vSphere being the "first cloud operating system" and both of these items are true.

Immediately after the video, Paul Maritz was welcomed to the stage to talk about vSphere and he was clearly excited. During the time that Paul was on stage, it was clear that he is truly passionate about VMware and vSphere. Paul went on to describe vSphere as a product that "speaks to a hunger", and clearly represented the fact that vSphere is an evolution that extends beyond innovation.

Many more big names got on stage to talk about vSphere and it's capabilities and potential impact that it will have on the IT industry including Steve Herrod (CTO and VP VMware), John Chambers (Cisco), Pat Gelsinger (Intel), James Mouton (HP) and Michael Dell (Dell). One of the key items that was reinforced through the whole launch event was the fact that with vSphere there is not a single workload that cannot be 100 percent virtualised. This was demonstrated in a technical demo, and reinforced via statements and benchmarks from multiple presenters. In particular, comment was made around the workloads such as Oracle, and SQL of high transactional nature.

Steve Herrod announced that General Availability (GA) for the vSphere product set will be this quarter, and described the amount of effort that went into creation of the ground breaking cloud computing operating system. There were over 1000 engineers involved, 3 million engineering hours and all of this work led to over 150 new capabilities and featuresets over VI 3.5.

Steve led a demonstration outlining some of the key features that lead to the efficiency, control and choice that vSphere delivers including :

• Host Profiles - The ability to standardise configurations, identify deviation from these configurations and the ability to remediate based on deviation.
• Fault Tolerance - A shadow virtual machine replica running in lockstep to protect a virtual machine with zero dowtime and self healing properties
• VMsafe API's - Including vShield Zones allowing a distinct level of trust and confidentiality
• Storage VMotion - Now available through the GUI and therefore widely usable, it appears to have finally grown up.
• Thin Provisioning and other storage related features such as hot extents and hot adds into virtual machines

There are many more features than this available and much more detail can be described on the featureset, but the level Steve went to was appropriate for the launch. He ran a demonstration of the fault tolerance with a blackberry server. The different versions and pricing was also discussed at a high level, and of particular note was the entry point price of only $166 per CPU for the essentials package targetting small business.

Michael Dell had some interesting comments to make, explaining his vision that the crisis and the economic downturn is presenting an opportunity. He explained that IT departments today are spending 1 dollar to acquire technology and 8 dollars to manage it which not sustainable. Variation in infrastructure was identified as a killing blow, and a key feature that appeals with vSphere is the standardisation opportunities that it brings to the datacentre.

It must be mentioned that at many times during the launch, the team that created vSphere was credited for the success they have achieved and the success that vSphere will enable the company to achieve in the future.