VMware this week rolled out a new version of its flagship vSphere product, which comes together with a new licensing model. In a nutshell, VMware is now handling the licensing (and pricing) of its virtualization management products on a virtual machine level and not based on the number of processors. This better aligns licensing costs to the number of VMs being managed, says the company.

Other salient points: vSphere 4.1 Essentials is now priced cheaper, while vMotion capabilities can now be found in its vSphere 4.1 Essentials Plus and Standard editions. Pushing the envelope as the leader in this arena, vMotion migrations have been tweaked further and are now five times as fast.

Of interest to the enterprise and large service providers would be scalability improvements added in vSphere 4.1, which effectively doubles the capacity of resources available in a single pool. Memory compression capabilities also mean that vSphere 4.1 is able to handle 25 percent more memory; what this translates into is an increased number of VMs that can be run per server.

For more on this story:
- check out the article at Redmond Channel Partner
- check out the article at InformationWeek

Related Articles:
No timeline for release of client hypervisor, says VMware
Red Hat CEO: VMware is biggest competitor
Google partners with VMware to target businesses
VMware, Citrix behind in bare-metal hypervisor for desktops
VMware offers up to 50 percent discount on vSphere